Until I read The Mummy Congress by Heather Pringle (Penguin Viking), I thought mummies were just dead people with good PR. But this book traces the role mummies have played in anthropological, historical and medical research, as well as helping to re
Patty Osborne
The Imaginary Girlfriend
John Irving's The Imaginary Girlfriend (Knopf) is an attractive little hardcover book that is a pleasure to look at and to hold. But to read it is another matter.
Stephen Osborne
The Medicine Line: Life and Death on a North American Borderland
The myth of the West in Canada and the U.S.A. issues largely from a country almost unknown to most North Americans: the wide plains that spill over the forty-ninth parallel between Montana and Saskatchewan. Beth LaDow, who lives in Massachusetts and
Michael Hayward
The Narrow Waters
Julien Gracq, one of France’s most senior and respected writers, provides a living bridge to the era of Proust and Alain-Fournier, and in his slim book The Narrow Waters (Turtle Point) Gracq explores a theme favoured by both of those writers: the mys
S. K. Page
The Middle Stories
Sheila Heti, author of The Middle Stories (Anansi) has received much praise in the Globe and the National Post, all of it deserved. The stories in this little volume are very short and very good: formidable might be the right word.
Mandelbrot
The Montreal Gazette
The Montreal Gazette reports that Réjean Ducharme, whose new novel Va Savoir is at the top of the bestseller list, has released a photograph of him after a photographic hiatus of twenty-five years, or, in the words of the Gazette caption writer, "a q
Patty Osborne
The Museum Guard
Speaking of the library, the day after I borrowed The Bird Artist by Howard Norman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a book my brother had recommended, The Museum Guard (Knopf), also by Norman, arrived in the Geist office. For some reason I chose to read Th
Michael Hayward
The Lizard Cage
Karen Connelly has travelled extensively in southeast Asia and described her experiences through non-fiction (Touch the Dragon, a memoir of her year in Thailand, won the Governor General’s Award in 1993) and poetry. Connelly’s first novel, The Lizard
Michael Hayward
The Maytrees
For summer I favour books that can withstand the indignities of the season: beat-up paperbacks that can get stained by sunscreen, or library hardcovers in Brodart jackets that can be wiped clean with a damp cloth. But I make exceptions for new books
Geist Staff
The Lotus-Eaters
The current film festival season features two movies written by Geist correspondents Tom Walmsley and Peg Thompson.... Peg Thompson's movie we have seen: it's called The Lotus-Eaters, and it's set in the sixties on one of the Gulf Islands of BC, in
Daniel Francis
The Living Unknown Soldier
In The Living Unknown Soldier (Henry Holt), the French historian Jean-Yves Le Naour tells the story of “Anthelme Mangin,” an amnesiac discovered wandering on the train-station platform in Lyon in February 1918. He was assumed to be a prisoner of war
JILL MANDRAKE
The Man Who Killed Houdini
The Man Who Killed Houdini by Don Bell (Véhicule Press) is the story of J. Gordon Whitehead, who, as the accepted story goes, was chatting with Houdini in Montreal, along with three McGill students, when he unexpectedly punched Houdini in the stomach
Sarah Leavitt
The Love that Won’t Shut Up
On the eighth night of the Vancouver Queer Film Festival, my girlfriend and I and about 175 other people crowded into the Vancity Theatre to see The Love That Won’t Shut Up, the first production in the Out on Screen Film and Video Society’s Queer His
Shannon Emmerson
The Life of Margaret Laurence
For Christmas I asked for The Life of Margaret Laurence by James King (Knopf) because I had read the reviews and articles that were published upon the book's release, and they piqued my interest in a literary icon whose life story I had always believ
Geist Staff
The Holy Forest
The Holy Forest by Robin Blaser (Coach House) is not a book about ecology, although it does remind us of the concept of the sacred grove, which is central to aboriginal belief systems in which language and knowledge are said to come from certain land
Michael Hayward
The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories
Those who have read Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (Vintage), and those who have seen the film version, will remember that the sole possession of the eponymous patient, Count László de Almásy, was a battered copy of Herodotus’s Histories, an
Mandelbrot
The Life of Yousuf Karsh
In an interview reported in The Life of Yousuf Karsh by Maria Tippett (Anansi), Karsh said that he strove to bring out “the strength and personality” of men and “the charm and beauty” of women—an aesthetic purpose that he never abandoned, and one tha
Blaine Kyllo
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
When I was an undergrad, I took a psychology class in which the professor described various types of creativity. One of them was the creative act of taking things already in existence and reorganizing, reordering, recreating them to make something ne
Kevin Barefoot
The Last House of Ulster: a Family in Belfast
During a trip to Ireland last spring, I remembered Charles Foran's The Last House of Ulster: a Family in Belfast (HarperCollins), so when I got back to Canada I tracked it down at the library. It describes Foran's fourteen-year relationship with the
Stephen Osborne
The Labradorians: Voices from the Land of Cain
The Labradorians: Voices from the Land of Cain (Breakwater) is another big compilation (500 pages), this one made by Lynne Fitzhugh from the pages of Them Days, a quarterly journal of oral history that has been published in Happy Valley, near Goose B
Kris Rothstein
The Interpreter of Maladies
There are few appearances by God in The Interpreter of Maladies (Mariner Books), a Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri. Lahiri’s settings are both secular and multicultural, and the challenge facing her characters is t
Kris Rothstein
The Last Samurai
I had fun in the gifted class in elementary school because my parents never pressured me to become a sensation in spelling, or science—or, like Maya, the ethereal figure in Nancy Huston’s tense novel Prodigy (McArthur), a brilliant ten-year-old piani
Patty Osborne
The Key of Do
In my reading life I’ve been locked in YA (young adult) land ever since I found myself surrounded by a gaggle of teenage nieces at a family party. I tried the usual icebreakers about school and friends, but the conversation really got going when I as
GILLIAN JEROME
The Hip Mama Survival Guide
Child-rearing manuals cropped up with a vengeance in the latter half of the twentieth century after Dr. Benjamin Spock produced Baby and Child Care—the all-time best-selling book in American history, second only to the Bible, despite advice such as “
Last month in Calgary a friend showed me the way to Louise Bridge by sketching a map with her fingertip on the dust jacket of The Wolf King, a book by Judd Palmer that we had been admiring at her kitchen table.
David Albahari
Bird in the Willow
Some
Jane Awde Goodwin
Dear Doctor
The Health Hotline can only do so much for the exotic animals swimming in a hole on your forehead.
Manfred Buchheit
Burin Highway
From Mapping a Sense of Place: The Photographs of Manfred Buchheit, 1972-1995, an exhibition curated by Bruce Johnson for the Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador.
Veronica Gaylie
Memory Test
Does the individual have difficulty finding words, finishing sentences or naming people or things?
Veronica Gaylie
The Guy Upstairs
Veronica Gaylie encounters Trevor Linden, the Greatest Canuck Who Ever Lived, in economy class.
Jane Silcott
Lurching Man
One instinctive action saves a life in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
Stephen Gauer
Jumper
Another classic story from Geist's 20th Anniversary Collector's Issue."I felt disoriented, almost light-headed, as though I were slightly stoned or moving inside a dream."
Stephen Osborne
Chiquita Canáda
Last month we had a visit from Elizabeth Anderson, who hails from Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she is a graduate student at the state university. Her field of study is Canada, and she also writes about Canada for Utne Reader.
Stephen Osborne
Shots Fired
A new dispatch from Geist's 20th Anniversary Collector's Edition."How did more shots fired represent what we miss in life, in city life?"
Stephen Osborne
The Lost Art of Waving
Before people 'poked' and 'tweeted', waving was how we said hello and goodbye to each other.
Miriam Toews
Sweet Badass Dude
A nervous kid from Canada becomes the king of the basketball courts in Venice Beach.
Saeko Usukawa
Gulf Island Sojourn
"Campbell River, best fishing in the world. They do everything for you. All you have to do is bring yourself and decide what you're going to drink."
Stephen Osborne
Banker Poet
Stephen Osborne recollects his encounter last summer with Robert Service outside a cafe in Vancouver. Service, who wrote the poem "The Cremation of Sam McGee," died in 1958.
Daniel Collins
Phallic Blessing
In Drukpa Kunley's monastery in Bhutan, Daniel Collins experiences a birthday blessing among phallic iconography.
Myrl Coulter
Room Ten
Was that a ghost?Why don't you have room service?We used up all your Kleenex. Sorry.Read more entries from a guest book found in room ten of a hotel in British Columbia's Okanagan Valley.
Michael Turner
Making Stuff Up
Author Michael Turner riffs on D.M. Fraser's short fiction Class Warfare, one of the ten classic Vancouver books reissued for Vancouver's 125th birthday.
Stephen Osborne
Life on Masterpiece Avenue
Stephen Osborne memorializes D.M. Fraser, a tiny ancient man at the age of twenty-six, who wrote sentences that made you want to take him (and them) home with you.
Edith Iglauer
Aquafun
Plumb the depths of the Aquafit subculture with our embedded nonagenarian.
Veronica Gaylie
Blue Cheese
A decadent feast of poetry; but what will it do to your heart?
Stephen Osborne
The Tall Women of Toronto
In this city of tall buildings, the most imposing shadows are cast by women.
Jeff Shucard
Hurricane
Four days after Sandy, Shucard's parents are in good humour, very brave and very glad to see him—and unsure if he's taking them to Bolivia, Azerbaijan or Canada.
Francois-Marc Gagnon
Among the Curious
Francois-Marc Gagnon explores curiosity as the opposite of indifference.
Michael Turner
Oh, Canada
Michael Turner questions a US-curated exhibit of Canadian art that exoticizes Canadian artists while suggesting they are un-exotic.
Chelsea Novak
National Boyfriend
At a taping of George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight, Chelsea Novak meets Canada's boyfriend.
Violence could not reach them only when they were distant as the moon, not of this world
JEROME STUEART
Fact
The Dead Viking My Birthmother Gave Me
“The first time I met him, he caused me to float to the ceiling"
Joseph Pearson
Fact
No Names
Sebastian and I enjoy making fun of le mythomane. We compare him to characters in novels. Maybe he can’t return home because he’s wanted for a crime.
Minelle Mahtani
Fact
Looking for a Place to Happen
What does it mean to love a band? A friend? A nation?
Christine Lai
Fact
Now Must Say Goodbye
The postcard presents a series of absences—the nameless photographer,
the unknown writer and recipient; it is constituted by what is unknown
Gabrielle Marceau
Fact
Main Character
I always longed to be the falling woman—impelled by unruly passion, driven by beauty and desire, turned into stone, drowned in flowers.
Mia + Eric
Future Perfect
New bylaws for civic spaces.
JUDY LEBLANC
Walking in the Wound
It is racism, not race, that is a risk factor for dying of COVID-19.
SADIQA DE MEIJER
Do No Harm
Doing time is not a blank, suspended existence.
Kristen den Hartog
The Insulin Soldiers
It was as though a magic potion had brought him back to life.
Steven Heighton
Everything Turns Away
Going unnoticed must be the root sorrow for the broken.
DANIEL CANTY
The Sum of Lost Steps
On the curve of the contagion and on the measure of Montreality.
Brad Cran
Fact
Potluck Café
It took me a million miles to get here and half the time I was doing it in high heels.
Carellin Brooks
Ripple Effect
I am the only woman in the water. The rest of the swimmers are men or boys. One of them bobs his head near me, a surprising vision in green goggles, like an undocumented sea creature. I imagine us having sex, briefly, him rocking over me like a wave.
MARCELLO DI CINTIO
The Great Wall of Montreal
The chain-link fence along boulevard de l’Acadie— two metres high, with “appropriate hedge”—separates one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in Montreal from one of the poorest.
Michał Kozłowski
New World Publisher
Randy Fred thought that life after residential school would be drinking, watching TV and dying. Instead, he became the "greatest blind Indian publisher in the world."
BRAD YUNG
Lessons I’m Going To Teach My Kids Too Late
"I want to buy a house. And build a secret room in it. And not tell the kids about it."
Paul Tough
City Still Breathing: Listening to the Weakerthans
I wasn’t certain whether I was in Winnipeg because of the Weakerthans, or whether I cared about the Weakerthans because I care about Winnipeg.
Stephen Osborne
This Postcard Life
Spiritual landscapes and unknowable people captured on film, used to convey a message.
Hilary M. V. Leathem
To Coronavirus, C: An Anthropological Abecedary
After Paul Muldoon and Raymond Williams.
Bill MacDonald
The Ghost of James Cawdor
A seance to contact a dead miner at Port Arthur, Ontario, in 1923—conducted by Conan Doyle himself.
Ann Diamond
The Second Life of Kiril Kadiiski
He has been called the greatest Bulgarian poet of his generation. Can one literary scandal bury his whole career?
Caroline Adderson
Lives of the House
A basement shrine in her 1920s home inspires Caroline Adderson to discover the past lives of her house and its inhabitants.
Alberto Manguel's column from Geist 93 about how the most important Turkish novelist of modern times took over fifty years to reach English-speaking audiences.
Daniel Francis
We Are Not a Nation of Amnesiacs
"Canadians have long been convinced that we do not know much, or care much, about our own history, but a new study suggests that this truism is not true."
Stephen Henighan
Fighting Words
A look back at World War I as the first great twentieth-century pollution of language.
Alberto Manguel
Reading the Commedia
An appreciation of Dante's "Commedia."
Daniel Francis
Magical Thinking
The canoe as a fetish object, a misreading of Canadian history and a symbol of colonial oppression.
Stephen Henighan
Homage to Nicaragua
Despite hardships and dangerous slums, Nicaragua maintains a sense of hope that draws back to the democratic days of the Sandinistas.
Alberto Manguel
Role Models and Readers
Ruskin's readers have the power to know that there is indeed room for Alice at the Mad Hatter's table.
Alberto Manguel
Imaginary Islands
In order to discharge ourselves of certain problems, why not simply erase from our maps the sites of such nuisance?
Alberto Manguel
Face in the Mirror
What does it mean to "be" yourself? The face reflected in the mirror is unrecognizable.
Stephen Henighan
The Market and the Mall
In the farmer’s market, a quintessentially Canadian setting, much of Canada is not visible.
Daniel Francis
Sex, Drugs, Rock ’n’ Roll and the National Identity
In this essay, Daniel Francis discusses how Gerda Munsinger—a woman with ties to the criminal underworld—shaped Canadian politics in the 1960s.
EVELYN LAU
Love Song to America
Reflections on John Updike's death.
Alberto Manguel
The Other Side of the Ice
Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner is a film about community and the north.
Sheila Heti
American Soul
Slot machines sing their astral music. The tape recorder turns off. “Do you talk to friends about sex?” he asks.
Alberto Manguel
Geist’s Literary Precursors
The Geist map has a venerable ancestor that goes back four centuries and halfway around the world.
Annabel Lyon
Irony-Free Reality TV
There may be more to reality TV than meets the eye.
Alberto Manguel
Cooking by the Book
I'm always looking for the moment in which a character must stop to eat because, for me, the very mention of food humanizes a story.
Stephen Henighan
How They Don’t See Us
During the 1980s the literary critic Edward Said organized occasional research seminars at Columbia University in New York.
Alberto Manguel
My Friendship With Rat And Mole
The books we love become our cartography.
Daniel Francis
Afghanistan
One thing Canadians have learned from our armed incursion into Afghanistan is that we do not have a vocabulary for discussing war or warlike events.
Daniel Francis
African Gulag
The atrocities were carried out in the name of some version of “civilization” that the Queen represented.
Alberto Manguel
Neighbourhood of Letters
There are imaginary cities for scientists, vampires, lechers and even bad students—but what about writers?
Daniel Francis
Identity in a Cup
Is it the icons of Canadian pop culture—hockey fights, Tim Hortons coffee, Don Cherry’s haberdashery, Rick Mercer’s rants—that reveal the deepest truths about us?