"I am forever surprised by the fact that time passes more speedily between mountains than it does out on the prairie..."

“Sanaaq! Qumaq’s blood is too weak and the same is true for Aanikallak’s. They’ll both have to go to hospital!” From Sanaaq by Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk, the first ever Inuit novel.

"The waiting room was filled with junkies. During my visit, the doctor almost fell asleep. He sent me for some tests, but lost the results."

Rambunctious children bother Comrade Gas Jockey, Crazy Sea Foam and a man named 3.14 in Granma Nineteen and the Soviet's Secret by Ondjaki.

"My daughter has fallen in love with a professional hockey player. He refers to her as his puck bunny, which I have decided to find cute."

"The world thinks of me as a great lover, but the truth is, I’m not."

"She insisted that I write into your will that the funeral must not be held in the rain.""Whose funeral?" I asked."Yours."

"I hate feeling sorry for people, because the world isn't perfect and I can't feel sorry for every unfortunate bastard I come across."

"How do people shake off the embarrassment of being themselves, ignore the distastefulness of all that is human and just get along?"

"And my theory about professional artists was as follows: Artists are not necessarily the most creative or inspired individuals in any given community."

The Only Other Gay in Edmonton had his own apartment and his own gay boyfriend and a stack of gay jeans that hit the ceiling.

Did the baby understand? Not just ‘go potty’ or ‘bad boy’ but circular concepts of loss and betrayal and identity and love?

"I just had to pick up the phone and say, 'Bree, get the Ashtray' and she’d fetch the Buick from guest parking and pull up to the front door"

Despite the distracting jewellery, the cleavage and the exercised bodies, we look in the mirror and say, What happened? By M.A.C. Farrant.

A sleepwalking old man brings a community together in the waves of the sea.

The documentary filmmaker, a jean-jacketed young woman with a silver crescent in her nose, wanted me to Share My Story.

Jenny didn’t have to run away to join the circus—it came to her. But not with midgets, bearded ladies or elephant men in tow. No sir, the circus had gone out and bought itself some style.

A young girl gets a taste of show business by acting as Sleeping Beauty in a sideshow.

In this excerpt from Adam Gilders' Another Ventriloquist, a father builds his daughter a swan's nest, a ventriloquist revises his act, and a beaver terrorizes a neighbourhood.

In Katie Daubs' short fiction, a father writes a deathbed letter to his children, explaining the surprising way he really met their mother.

"We smoke, sometimes we drink, pop a few pills, eat peanuts, or suck on hard candy." Nine unambiguous short stories by David Albahari.

In this excerpt from Steven Heighton's new book, The Dead Are More Visible, a firefighter must decide what lives are worth saving in the heat of a four-alarm fire. The official line is that firefighters save people—but what about reptiles?

"And if you haven’t yet learned which colour you are, it shouldn’t matter, one tends to think."

Another classic story from Geist's 20th Anniversary Collector's Issue.