I can’t recall the first time I heard the phrase “so‑called Canada,” but I am quite sure it must have come from somebody paid by the government. It’s the kind of phrase career bureaucrats say. Several of our universities have used it in official documents. Non-profits, in their grant applications, sometimes use it. It’s the world’s most casual form of political…
Stephen Marche
Stephen Marche is the author of The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future and On Writing and Failure, among other books.
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Stephen Marche
Work isn’t working anymore. COVID‑19 has thrown off the machinery of twenty-first-century capitalism, and as it stalls and sputters, turning over on its side, the gears and wheels lie open and exposed. This virus has revealed just how far economic theory has diverged from the actual process of earning a living. The unemployment rate is the highest it’s been since the Great…
The document is elegant. No one can dispute that. The deep navy blue of its slightly pebbled cover, the understated gilt imprint of the royal arms of Canada, which somehow looks faded even when new — the passport is a classic. Its cover may be harder, more durable, the pages inside more decorated than when I was a…
Many years ago, I was mistaken for a literary Jew. My first book, Raymond and Hannah, had just been published—a novel-in-emails about a long-distance relationship between a graduate student in Toronto and a yeshiva student in Jerusalem—and I had been invited to participate in a Jewish literary festival in Vancouver. Some moments in a writer’s life can be…
On Manhood, Marriage and the “Neo-patriarchy”
Rachel Giese in conversation with Stephen Marche March 2017
In his new book, The Unmade Bed: The Messy Truth about Men and Women in the 21st Century, Stephen Marche explores the current state of gender relations through a personal account of his nearly 20-year marriage—with footnotes from his wife, Sarah Fulford. A novelist (The Hunger of the Wolf) and a columnist for Esquire…
I wonder if there exist, anywhere, any writers who feel that they are full-throatedly a part of their time and place.
I remember, when I was much younger, meeting Michael Ondaatje at a party. At the time, he was absolutely my literary hero—this was just before the film of The English Patient came out—and I asked him what I should read to become a better…