Forty percent of people believe that if they practice enough, they can predict the outcome of a flipped coin. Would my current love end the way my past ones had?

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Justin Trudeau and Greta Thunberg attend the Montreal climate march.

Boyfriends are trouble, I said. He leaned over and gave me a high-five.

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."

This was the first pub I entered when I finally said goodbye to vomiting on local beaches because I could drink legally. And it’s the first pub I’ve come to since I’ve been home. Now it’s Tuesday night, Karaoke Night.

Before I opened for Joyce Carol Oates at her reading at Harbourfront in Toronto, we had dinner: Oates and her husband, Raymond Smith; the organizer, Greg Gatenby; and me.

“Don’t try to make anything happen,” the calm voice said. Dylan Gyles visits a sensory deprivation float tank.

The first time losing a game of Scrabble and the last time taking a train cross-country.

In Drukpa Kunley's monastery in Bhutan, Daniel Collins experiences a birthday blessing among phallic iconography.

Jill Mandrake on the surprising effect of peanut brittle.

A warm spring night, a country club dance, a date with an attractive young man—and braces on my two front teeth.

At the Tim Hortons on Young Street in Halifax, a man clears his throat, a rough-looking older guy in the back corner, staring out the window. One knee, angled out from the table, jigs up and down; the rest of him is quite still. A sheet of notepaper

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Rick laughed. I walked away. I was irritated at Henry, at Lee for getting stoned and being paranoid and leaving without saying goodbye, at Rick, at everyone.

Michael Turner questions a US-curated exhibit of Canadian art that exoticizes Canadian artists while suggesting they are un-exotic.

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How do you have a good time in Warsaw? Sing Neil Diamond songs in a karaoke bar.

"have ya been ev’ryweir?"

Enjoy the fresh kebab while your freshly dented fender gets fixed.

Evelyn Everett-Green wrote novels for young people, of a morally improving nature. Her books were also meant to entertain, with tales of wholesome adventure and romance, often set in heroic times or picturesque locations.

When I met you, one floor up from the acute psychosis ward, you were wearing a paper shower cap and green pyjamas just like mine. You glared at me through the crowd because you thought I had your hoodie on. But we just had very similar hoodies.

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A greying, sunburnt American mis­sionary stopped us in the fruit market and invited us for a drink.

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Evil is not darkness, I thought to myself. It’s noise.

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When I was twelve my father enrolled me in a typing course from which I emerged typing with two fingers.

She was a conversationalist, a home builder and a deliverer of calves. Those who loved Ursula will miss her adventurous soul.

Ebb and flow in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico.

A blizzard hits two days before Christmas, stirring up feelings of trepidation and excitement for the passengers of a bus.

Violence could not reach them only when they were distant as the moon, not of this world

Language built on sounds of delight, coloured in the gardens of Beirut

“The first time I met him, he caused me to float to the ceiling"

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.

What does it mean to love a band? A friend? A nation?

When I lived in Ottawa in the 1970s, I used to enjoy passing lazy afternoons at the National Gallery looking at the pictures. I remember how surprised I was when I first encountered the Group of Seven collection. These paintings were completely familiar—I’d seen them in schoolbooks and on calendars, posters, t-shirts, everywhere—yet at the same time they were completely unexpected.

It took me a million miles to get here and half the time I was doing it in high heels.

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"Leading Men” is taken from a work-in-progress, Cinéma-Verité and the Collected Works of Ronald Reagan: A History of Propaganda in Motion Pictures.

The postcard presents a series of absences—the nameless photographer,

the unknown writer and recipient; it is constituted by what is unknown

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Going unnoticed must be the root sorrow for the broken.

Doing time is not a blank, suspended existence.

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.

Derek Matthews has to be the ugliest boy in the class but I like him. I’ve liked every boy except Barry Pumphrey now. Barry Pumphrey likes me.

These stories and conversations took place in a Media and Communications Studies class at a Canadian college. Students come to the college from many countries, in the hope of enrolling eventually in a North American university.

"I want to buy a house. And build a secret room in it. And not tell the kids about it."

Remembering her father's last days in a hospital in Wyoming, Connie Kuhns struggles with questions of mortality, memory and how to fulfill her father's dying wish.

A new anthology of reviews, interviews and commentary on Joni Mitchell's music reveals the star-making machinery.

Did that really happen? J. Jill Robinson initiates a midnight stand-off between the police and two drunk brothers in an RV Park in White Rock, B.C.

Out on the set, except for the fact that there is always someone to catch us if we stumble, or someone to set up folding chairs for us between scenes, we are beneficiaries of the semi that denies the passing of clock-time. There is nothing to remind

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."

It is racism, not race, that is a risk factor for dying of COVID-19.

World War I, Canada’s “war of independence,” marked a turning point for a young colony wanting to prove itself as a self-reliant nation, but at what cost.

After Paul Muldoon and Raymond Williams.

Reviws of "Slave Old Man" by Patrick Chamoiseau

Review of "Something, Not Nothing: A Story of Grief and Love" by Sarah Leavitt.

Review of "House Work" curated by Caitlin Jones and Shiloh Sukkau.

Review of "M Train" by Patti Smith.

Review of "On Community" by Casey Plett.

Review of "The Boy and the Heron" directed by Hayao Miyazaki.

Review of "The Man in the Red Coat" by Julian Barnes.

Review of "Conversations with Khahtsahlano, 1932–1954" reissued by Massy Books and Talonbooks.

Review of "Hangman: The True Story of Canada’s First Executioner" by Julie Burtinshaw.

Review of "Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game" written and directed by Austin Bragg and Meredith Bragg.

Review of "Queers Like Me" by Michael V. Smith.

Review of "Rearrangements" by Natan Last, published in The New Yorker December 2023.

Review of "Cabin Fever" by Anik See.

Review of "Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood" by Lucy Jones.

Review of "Edible and Medicinal Flora of the West Coast: British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest" by Collin Varner.

Review of "The Adversary" by Michael Crummey.

Review of "Galore" by Michael Crummey.

Review of "Jo Cook and Perro Verlag Books by Artists: The Unreadable Sacred," organized by the Simon Fraser University Art Gallery.

Review of "Gertrude and Alice" produced by United Players of Vancouver.

Review of "Big Mall: Shopping for Meaning" by Kate Black.

Review of "Censorettes" by Elizabeth Bales Frank.

Review of "Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea" by Teffi (trans. Robert Chandler).

Review of "Our Flag Means Death" created by David Jenkins on HBO Max.

Review of No Fun (the band) and reissued music by Atomic Werewolf Records.

A city is an atmosphere defined by a history. A great city's streets may reflect its past, but only art makes a city's history, like its distinctive mood, present to the world.

"There are people," Chateaubriand comments, "who, in the midst of the collapse of empires, visit fountains and gardens"

The crowds learned that they could not act effectively in the present without confronting the past, specifically the historical treatment of indigenous people.

"Since the beginning of time (the telling of which is also a story), we have known that words are dangerous creatures."

Lacking in drama and embarrassingly undemocratic, Canada’s origins owe a lot to old-fashioned politics and not much to European battles or transcontinental railways.

Lonely Planet readers no longer travel in Bolivia or Thailand, but within the elastic, infinitely portable boundaries of the Lonely Planet nation.

In the world between here and there, what place does one call home?

Mordecai Richler, in a withering put-down, once dismissed the novelist Hugh Garner as “a good speller.” In the summer of 2003, grinding through 160 Canadian books as a jury member for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction in English, I learned that for many contemporary Canadian writers, Garner’s level of dubious distinction remains out of reach.

In Chicago, where he settled, William Henry Jackson, British settler, transformed himself into Honoré Jaxon, Métis freedom fighter. He identified so closely with the Métis struggle for justice that he became one of them. He had no trouble convincing others that he was a Native and probably had no trouble convincing himself either.

Science and the arts fulfil their functions to help us survive through the imagination.

Slot machines sing their astral music. The tape recorder turns off. “Do you talk to friends about sex?” he asks.

Stephen Henighan argues that efficiency has become a core value that heightens social divisions.

No one knows quite how to account for the well-established shops in Vancouver, Toronto and other cities that deal exclusively in fountain pens and fine fountain-pen accessories.

“Have patience” and “Tomorrow” are two inseparable locutions in the Portuguese tongue.

Stephen Henighan remembers Mavis Gallant, the original nomad of Canadian literature, who wrote some of Canada's finest fiction at Pablo Picasso's café table in Paris.

I met Alejandra Pizarnik in Buenos Aires, in 1967, five years before her death. I had asked her to contribute to an anthology of texts that purported to continue an interrupted story begun in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale: “There was a man dwelt by a churchyard.” She agreed and wrote a haunting piece called “Los muertos y la lluvia,” “The dead and the rain.” The book was never published, but we became friends.

How much does a photograph really capture the essence of a person?

When I was in school in Argentina, Europe (our notion of Europe) was a vast and powerful conglomerate of culture and wisdom. From there, from across the Atlantic, came the history to which, magister dixit, we owed our existence; from there came the writers whose literature we read, the musicians whose music we listened to, the filmmakers whose films we watched.

Art museums and geographical exp

We think of the Arctic as pristine and untouched—but nowhere on the planet is as harshly impacted by climate change.

In a world dominated by heroes, difference is not tolerated.

Daniel Francis investigates the practice of visiting asylums and penitentiaries as entertainment in nineteenth-century Canada.

One of the pleasures of reading for no particular reason is coming across hidden stories, involuntary essays, samples of what someone once called “found literature”—as opposed, I imagine, to the literature that states its official identity on the cover. Leafing through a book on Samuel de Champlain, I came across, of all things, a detective story.

I first tried to read J. M. Coetzee in 1994, when I was twenty-three. I failed.