How did the 99 B-Line bus route come to be the locus of the most heartless transit rides in Greater Vancouver?

25 reasons to stop talking to my straight friend.

That dreamlike quality causes rational minds to dismiss the moment as “only a coincidence.”

Leaving Thunder Bay isn't one of the things that gets easier with practice

In search of a unified self.

The man who told me to sit here is wearing a blue uniform. He asks me questions. “You’re going to sacrifice your body just to save some money,” he jokes.

Christine Novosel talks life in Scotland: "What Glasgow lacks in beauty and brains, it makes up for with wit and resilience."

Despite attempts to reattach my pinkie, I woke up with nine fingers.

On the night of the last Wednesday of February 1884, at about ten o’clock, a gang of armed men entered a farmhouse near Sumas Lake in southern B.C., woke the inhabitants at gunpoint and took away with them a teenage boy who was being held in the cust

Very quietly, very slowly, happiness can take over a person's life

Sheila Heti spends a day in a diner in Toronto observing the enormous EUCAN electrified garbage can at the corner of College and Bathurst.

“Excuse me, are you the customer with the peanut allergy?”

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.

Women in '50s chic, men in sports jackets, and all manner of musical instruments at a suburban home in Toronto.

Angela Wheelock meets a stranger at a bus stop and discusses Rumi, Hafiz and other great poets who were terrible leaders.

I had my car at the hotel but snow was expected, and driving home alone in a snowstorm around the hairpin curves edged with deep ravines on Highway 101 was the last thing I wanted to do.

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.

Eve Corbel draws emoji you can use when Mercury is in retrograde, when you've eaten too much hot sauce and during other specific times of need.

Jeff Shucard reminisces about St. Patrick's Day, 1979: druidic magic, Irish fiddle tunes and the greatest piss-up of all time.

It was the big sort of rhmmm-rhmmm you hear at demolition derbies and ball-busting monster truck rallies. It was loud. Who could be sitting in their car, revving the engine?

“Want to marry me? My wife she burned me. She just burned me, you know. Now I’m going to court to burn her back.”

A eulogy delivered by email, from a woman living in Berlin to her lifelong friend in Vancouver.

Eve Corbel on marriage and what comes after the wedding: the monster mortgage, the dreary housework, the contemptuous in-laws and more.

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Montreal was once the “City of a Thousand Steeples.” Today it’s the city of a thousand church bazaars open on Saturdays to keep the cash flow up.

It is a Sunday in August. We drive from London, Ontario, to the Pinery Provincial Park in a new green 1964 Mercury Comet.

Did you hear that the railway built Canada? That’s probably all you heard

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What is at the heart of this Edith Iglauer profile by Giller nominee Annabel Lyon? Hint: Ice Road Truckers.

Sarah Leavitt is more than just a clever cartoonist; she also paints pictures with her colourful prose.

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.

And a sort of current ran through you when you saw it, a visceral, uncontrollable response. A physical resistance to the silence

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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?

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

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.

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.

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

Review of "Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell" by Ann Powers

Review of "The Mayfair Bookshop" by Eliza Knight

Review of "Fleece and Fibre: Textile Producers of Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands" by Francine McCabe

Review of "The Land of Milk and Honey" by C. Pam Zhang

Review of "More Richly in Earth: A Poet’s Search for Mary MacLeod" by Marilyn Bowering

Review of "Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk" by Kathleen Hanna

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Review of "No Jews Live Here" by John Lorinc

Michael Hayward on anticipating the arrival of Fitzcarraldo Editions

Randy Fred on the Indigenous Speakers Series at Vancouver Island University

Review of "How It Works Out" by Myriam Lacroix

Review of "The Cave" by José Saramago

Review of "Paris: A Poem" by Hope Mirrlees

A fast-paced seafaring adventure from my father’s bookshelf, in which a wealthy Londoner on a religious mission to Tasmania falls in with a crew of Manxmen smuggling tobacco, liquor and French porn.

Michael Hayward on three books that may make you a better writer.

Review of "Memories Look at Me" by Tomas Tranströmer

October 21, 2005, marked the 200th anniversary of the great naval battle of Trafalgar, an engagement in which Admiral Nelson and the British fleet ended Napoleon’s dream of invading England by crushing the French and Spanish fleets off the southwest

Michael Hayward reviews Anik See’s Saudade, a collection of essays to plunge you deep into the meanings of travel and place.

Michael Hayward reviews the sweater that Sarah Lund wears in every episode of Season 1 of The Killing, a serial crime drama.

Geoffrey Household’s 1939 novel Rogue Male—an old favourite of mine—follows a British sportsman as he returns from an unnamed central European country (read Germany), having failed in his attempt to assassinate the dictator who is that country’s head

The first time I saw Robinson Crusoe on Mars (Byron Haskin, Criterion DVD) was in the Cedar V Theatre, a Quonset-style, single-screen movie house on Lynn Valley Road in North Vancouver: 25 cents for a science-fiction double bill in 1965.

Road Novels, 1957—1960 is an omnibus volume dressed in the standard Library of America livery: a burgundy cloth binding; a black dust jacket discreetly trimmed in red, white and blue; a bound-in ribbon marker.

The French writer Julien Gracq, who will be ninety-seven this year, is a living link to the era of Louis Aragon and André Breton. Gracq has avoided the kind of recognition that most modern writers crave (he refused the Prix Goncourt in 1951), and his body of work is little known on this continent.

Michael Hayward reviews Some Rain Must Fall, part of the six volume memoir by Karl Ove Knausgaard.

Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé: The Correspondence (Norton) collects all of the extant letters exchanged by Rilke and Andreas-Salomé , a patron and fellow author, and (as the jacket copy describes her) “a key fin de siècle intellectual.”

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

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

Ruskin's readers have the power to know that there is indeed room for Alice at the Mad Hatter's table.

"The hemispheric context reveals the roots of the residential school system...Destroying Indigenous cultures was a positivist policy from Patagonia to Dawson City."

An appreciation of Dante's "Commedia."

There is no way to step back from the orgy of kisses without offending.

Rob Kovitz compiles the pressing questions of the day—"How are they gonna beat ISIS?" And, "On Twitter, who cares?"

For an English-speaking Canadian who has been exposed to French from an early age, Paris is the most disorienting city in Europe. It is grandiose, but it is mundane.

Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.

For a brief period the band CANO gave shape to the dream of a bilingual Canadian culture.

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.

The atrocities were carried out in the name of some version of “civilization” that the Queen represented.

"Resistance to wars is as much a Canadian tradition as fighting them." Daniel Francis discusses alternative histories, anti-draft demonstrations and the divisive nature of war.

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.

On March 5, 2006, a group of people gathered in a small Ontario city in the expectation of having books signed by an author who was not present.

What can the Brothers Grimm teach us about the state of our economic system? Everything.

A reflection on the complex and often inexplicable process of bibliographic categorizations.

What does it mean to "be" yourself? The face reflected in the mirror is unrecognizable.

Parables, cautionary tales, morality plays, allegories—the notion that we can study literary works as texts of ethics is as old as literature.

Stephen Henighan discusses the crude first steps to finding a new way to talk about racial reality.

The Penthouse, the notorious Vancouver night club, shares a history with several of the city's missing women cases.

A bibliophile's worst nightmare: being stuck on a plane with a terrible book. A book mistaken for a work of serious history.

Unravelling the mysteries of Alejo Carpentier

A misogynist, a racist and an academic walk into a bar...