Barfly

Michael Lista is an investigative journalist, essayist and poet. He has worked as a book columnist for the National Post and as the poetry editor of The Walrus. He is the author of four books: the poetry volumes Bloom and The Scarborough; Strike Anywhere, a collection of his writing about literature, television and culture; and The Human Scale: Murder, Mischief and Other Selected Mayhems, a book of longform journalism. His essays and investigative stories have appeared in the New Yorker, The Atlantic, Slate, The Walrus, Canadaland, and Toronto Life. He is a contributing editor at Toronto Life and Maclean's. He was the 2017 Margaret Laurence Fellow at Trent University and the winner of the 2020 National Magazine Awards for both Investigative Reporting and Long Form Feature Writing. His story “The Sting” is being adapted by Adam Perlman, Robert Downey Jr., and Team Downey into a television series for Apple TV+.

Forgive Me, Leonard

Auld Lang Syne
My Body Is a Temple
Kids
Putin
Able Archer
Based on a Story by Michael Lista
Dealing with Fans
The Bill
America
Cats
On the Disappearance of Roughly Eleven Billion Crabs and the
Cessation of Alaska’s Fishery
Traitorous Former Editors &
Cultural Apparatchiks
What It’s Like to Write a Book
Booze
Towards a Theory of Contemporary
Poetry
Bar Fights
Battle Raps
Nose Beers
War
Hamlet, Hamlet
Job, 23, in Hollywood
The Zoo
Draughts
Sports
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, 3/5 Stars
Freedom Convoy
Mum
Snow
Alea Iacta Est
The Yips
Merkins
Carmine
I Have a Gun in My Mouth
I Want to Go to Mount Baldy
What If God Was One of Us?
Jeff
Fuck You
Going to the Moon
Apollo 11
Lebensraum
Identity Theft
My Love
Clouds
Reasons to Live
The Bar in Hell
Sartre?
Dusk
Earth
One Last Shot of Jameson
Barfly

Hungover

Acknowledgements