The Bee Trading Card Series 1 includes twenty-four cards that feature facts about bee anatomy, physiology and classification.

The Senior Editor of Geist learns to "Wear Knee Socks with Everything" from an exceptional blog turned print book by Tavi Gevinson.

On my summer holiday I immersed myself in World War I, thanks to a friend who loaned me all three parts of Pat Barker's trilogy: Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road (Plume/Penguin). This is a large and important work conveniently pac

Mandelbrot reviews The Secret Parts of Fortune: Three Decades of Intense Investigations and Edgy Enthusiasms by Bruce Dern.

Although I am not a woman, did not grow up in the late '6os just a few blocks up from the infamous Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco and am not the child of enlightened parents who strove against mainstream American materialism, I jumped two-footed int

Norbert Ruebsaat reviews Ingmar Bergman's Private Confessions and the screening at which he saw it.

Michael Hayward reviews My Struggle Book 1: A Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgård.

The recently published Better Living In Pursuit of Happiness From Plato To Prozac (Viking) by Mark Kingwell, a Canadian philosopher and intellectual celebrity, provides an in-depth analysis of our pleasure-centric society and the concept of happiness

A review of Love & the Mess We’re In by Stephen Marche.

Speaking of the beautifully explained inexplicable things in life Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red: A Romance (Knopf) is a gorgeous, astounding, poetic study of what things are like when you just happen to be red. The colour red.

On my summer holiday I immersed myself in World War I, thanks to a friend who loaned me all three parts of Pat Barker's trilogy: Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road (Plume/Penguin). This is a large and important work conveniently pac

Michael Hayward reviews An Omelette and a Glass of Wine by Elizabeth David (Grub Street).

Dan Post reviews Grant Lawrence's Adventures in Solitude (Harbour).

As the century turns, generational retrospectives are cropping up everywhere—a look back requires only file footage, the cut and paste. Recent books documenting Canadian life in the 1950s include Canada in the Fifties (Viking), selections from the ar

A Whiter Shade of Pale and Becoming Emma, by Catarina Edwards (NeWest), sports a truly appalling cover on the outside, and a most unfortunate typeface on the inside (can we even call it a typeface?—if this one has a name, it can only be font). These

"I am by no means a connoisseur of comics, and usually confine my reading to one or two titles. Now Action Girl Comics makes it three." Review by Mindy Abramowitz.

Jennesia Pedri answers: why would one want to reread a novel that devotes 211 of its 354 pages to the 227 days that followed a shipwreck?

I've been stuck on books from Newfoundland lately, so my fingers grabbed A Settlement of Memory by Gordon Rodgers (Killick Press) when last they cruised the shelves. Inspired by William Coaker, founder of the Fisherman's Protective Union, Rodgers has

A Provisional Life (Oberon) by Andre Major (translated by Sheila Fischman) got me thinking about the difference between a balcony and a porch. I read a lot of translated literature so I can usually overlook the occasional odd word usage, but when the

The other book is sure to become what the blurb writers call "an instant classic": A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk by Ingeborg Marshall (McGill-Queen's). The title sounds unpromising, and the book itself is a brute at 640 pages, but this is

Robert Allen's new book of stories, A June Night in the Late Cenozoic (Oolichan) is full of near-worlds with dimensions that intersect the three (or is it four) that we navigate by in this world. A man wakes up to find the Gaza Strip being relocated

Rudy Wiebe makes the physical North present as few writers can. We see the line of light on the spring horizon, taste the lichens that feed the caribou and sometimes the humans, feel the rough granite outcroppings, stand on the edge of the great nort

Michael Hayward reviews 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die (Barron's).

If a poem is going to grab you, it has to do it right away, as Lorna Crozier's poems do. Here are a few openers from her new book, Everything Arrives at the Light (McClelland & Stewart): "He had a good wife, he said, / she did not complete his senten

Dreaming Home, an anthology selected by Bethany Gibson (paper-plates), is another little book stuffed full of great stories—eight of them, all by emerging writers. My favourites were "Personal Effects" by Judith Kalman, about a father leaving his hom

Théodora Armstrong makes her literary debut with a short-story collection, Clear Skies, No Wind, 100% Visibility.

Stephen Osborne reviews The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature by Franco Moretti.

Jennesia Pedri reviews Walls: Travels Along the Barricades by Marcello di Cintio (Goose Lane).

A woman, hoping to find peace, seeks her birth mother. A review of By Blood by Ellen Ullman.

Kris Rothstein reviews Darwin's Bastards (Douglas & McIntyre).

Jennesia Pedri reviews Crossings by Betty Lambert.

Completely Mad, a diligent history of Mad magazine (by Maria Reidelbach, Little, Brown), is more than pop culture. It's literary and political history.

Mandelbrot reviews City of Glass by Douglas Coupland (Douglas & McIntyre).

Barbara Stewart reviews Captain Alex MacLean by Don MacGillivray (UBC Press).

As the century turns, generational retrospectives are cropping up everywhere—a look back requires only file footage, the cut and paste. Recent books documenting Canadian life in the 1950s include Canada in the Fifties (Viking), selections from the ar

Another oddly-shaped book protruding from the shelf at the library the other day was Canada's Gigantic (Summerhill), a collection of photographs by Henri Robideau, a Gianthropologist photographer who searches out Giant Things in the Canadian landscap

Caesarea (ECW Press) by Tony Burgess. There's no better place to spend New Year's Eve than Caesarea, a small town on the shore of menacing Lake Scugog, a place to forget your troubles, relax, do a little fishing, settle into your lawn chair on the ou

Bust magazine is dedicated to giving voice to the generation of women caught between Cosmo and Sassy. It is also font-crazy and printed on smudgy newsprint.

Patty Osborne reviews The Perimeter Dog by Julie Vandervoort.

Budavox (DC Books) by Todd Swift is a first collection of poems. Swift writes like something still matters, but he doesn't know what.

Just in: a copy of Broken Pencil; the Guide to Alternative Publications in Canada, Number One. A much needed guide to the weird and wonderful of the periodical press in Canada.

A review of Voyage Through the Past Century by Rolf Knight.

Lily Gontard reviews Nocturne: On the Life and Death of My Brother by Helen Humphreys.

Everyone has a guilty pop-culture pleasure. I read Entertainment Weekly regularly and I'm not afraid to admit it. Mark Kingwell, a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto and a noted magazine writer, has compiled all of his guilty pleasu

Don Stewart, proprietor of MacLeod's Books, is an antiquarian hoarder of the highest order.

Jim Christy muses on 121 items accumulated over 40 years of travel in Sweet Assorted: 121 Takes From a Tin Box, reviewed by Michael Hayward.

A review of David Mason's memoir The Pope’s Bookbinder.

Diana Athill never dreamed of writing—until one morning, suddenly she wrote. "Until that moment I had been hand-maiden, as editor, to other people’s writing, without ever dreaming of myself as a writer."

Moments of misunderstandings and other drama are highlighted in the life of a Jewish family in Nazi-occupied Czechoslavia.

A woman is reborn on the same cold and snowy night over and over again, living a different life of disasters, in Life After Life by Kate Atkinson.

In Levels of Life, Julian Barnes writes about the grief experienced after losing his wife to cancer.

Michael Hayward reviews Level 26: Dark Origins (Dutton).

A review of Bruce Sweeney's Last Wedding.

Grove Press has just brought out an English translation of Kitchen, by Banana Yoshimoto, an unclassifiable, magnificent little book that has won two literary awards and has had fifty-seven—yes, fifty-seven—printings in four years. As the dust jacket

Daniel Francis reviews the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Killer Angels by Michael Shaara, a minute-by-minute reimagining of the Battle of Gettysburg.

Mandelbrot reviews Jeff Wall: The Complete Edition (Phaidon).

Two recent books nicely illustrate, for me, the disturbing state of contemporary publishing. The first book, Hemingway: The Toronto Years (Doubleday) by William Burrill, a Toronto journalist, is a handsome example of the book-making art.... The secon

Mandelbrot reviews Maps of Paradise by Alessandro Scafi, a history of humanity's attempts to locate utopia.

Lily Gontard reviews One Day (Hodder & Staughton), David Nicholls's novel about a decades-long friendship.

Kris Rothstein reviews Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks by Ethan Gilsdorf (Lyons Press).

Linda Svendsen eviscerates the hypocritical nature of Canadian politics in Sussex Drive.

Laurence Gough has another police procedural out from McClelland & Stewart: Fall Down Easy is a fast read and fun, but not much different from the American prototype.

William Wallace Cook offers a literary guide to creating a unique plot.

Michael Hayward reviews What Poets Are Like by Gary Soto.

Belated discovery of the season: John Buell, whose novel Playground was originally published in 1976 and more recently by HarperCollins in a paperback edition bearing the single quote: "Canada's most brilliant suspense novelist.–New York Times." But

"I hope you will agree that we more sensitive teenagers grew up surrounded by irony." Jill Mandrake calls George Bowering's memoir his most provocative work yet.

In The Lynching of Louie Sam, two teenage boys watched as another—an Aboriginal named Louie Sam—was hanged by a group of men who rode on horseback. Reviewed by Patty Osborne.

A review of Julie Otsuka's novel, The Buddha in the Attic, about Japanese picture brides in the 1920s.

While doing research for a proposed TV series on heinous Victorian criminals, the hero of Paranoia in the Launderette, by Bruce Robinson (Bloomsbury), becomes convinced that there are murderers around every corner, hiding under his bed, poisoning his

Jenny Kent reviews Palpasa Café by Narayan Wagle (Publication Nepa~laya).

Lily Gontard reviews Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson.

Patty Osborne reviews One Bloody Thing After Another by Joey Comeau (ECW Press).

Steven Heighton's new book, On Earth As It Is, is bigger and much more spread out than his last one (Flight Paths of the Emperor) and more ambitious. His writing is strongest when he writes at a distance; especially fine are his excursions into the p

Daniel Francis explores the photographer as Vancouver's most interesting historian.

Dylan Gyles reviews They Never Told Me and Other Stories by Austin Clarke.

Because I am a fairly new fan of Martin Amis's novels, I picked up slim Night Train (Knopf Canada) with much interest. Amis is well known for novelistic experimentation (his Time's Arrow is written in reverse time), and he doesn't disappoint here.

Becky McEachern reviews Nikolski by Nicolas Dicker (Vintage).

Patty Osborne reviews Never Going Back by Antonia Banyard (Thistledown).

My New York Diary (Drawn & Quarterly) by Julie Doucet. Like all great graphic novels, this book manages to condense a complex set of circumstances into a simple tale: Montrealer Doucet moves to New York to join her boyfriend, who turns out to be para

"A door has closed, another door has opened. You have entered the winter of your life." A review of Paul Auster's memoir.

Hal Niedzviecki says White Lung by Grant Buday is the comic novel that should have been given to delegates at the WTO in Seattle.

Kelsea O'Connor reviews Let's Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson, a lighthearted look at the embarrassing moments in the author's life.

Michael Hayward reviews Trauma Farm by Brian Brett (Greystone).

Alana Mairs reviews Tigers Eyes by Judy Blume (Bradbury Press).

The film Three Seasons, a collage of small stories from modern Saigon, aroused contradictory feelings in me. The opening sequence was ravishing: at dawn in a blossom-covered lake surrounding a disused temple from some much earlier incarnation of Viet

A thin little book, The Voice Imitator (University of Chicago Press) by Thomas Bernhard, translated by Kenneth J. Northcott, made me laugh out loud in the dark as I sat propped up in bed, my reading light clipped to the back cover, while everyone els

Kris Rothstein reviews The Virgin Spy by Krista Bridges (Douglas & McIntyre).

Kris Rothstein reviews The Waterproof Bible by Andy Kaufman (Random House).

The UK literary journal, Flash, features concise forms of microfiction: short-short stories also known as "flashes".

A review of The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt, winner of Governor-General's Literary Award, the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, shortlisted for the Giller and the Man Booker Prize.

After the salt men pass a certain rock they all speak the salt language. Women are not allowed to hear this language, nor are they allowed to look in the direction of the lake where the salt language is spoken....The film is called The Salt Men of Ti

“I walked into the garage, and found a teenage boy in a tank top and shorts." Kathryn Mockler's poems eschew meaningless metaphors for direct language.

Kristen Cheung reviews The Secret Lives of Litterbugs by M.A.C. Farrant (Key Porter).

Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman (HarperCollins) is subtitled "A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary," and is a thrilling, chilling yarn about language and a history of lexicography. Its bumptious

A review of Garden Plots: Canadian Women Writers and Their Literary Gardens by Shelley Boyd.

The Pleasure of the Crown: Anthropology, Law and First Nations by Dara Culhane (Talonbooks) is the book for anyone who wants to understand the Delga-muukw decision—how it happened, what it means and why the Supreme Court ruling last December has frea

The Special Canadian Edition of The Old Farmer's Almanac, from Yankee Publishing Inc., is subtitled "Fitted for Ottawa, with special corrections and calculations for all the Canadian provinces." Items of interest include "Who is the Canadian Farmer?,

The Blue Circus (Cormorant) by Jacques Savoie, also translated by Sheila Fischman. Same translator, different story. Here the prose flows smoothly from start to finish, and even features the word lexiphone, which I have never heard in any language.

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

"Awkwardness comes with loving someone too much or not enough." A review of Other People We Married by Emma Straub.