The more that I read now about the climate emergency, the more references I find within my other reading. Here, in Deirdre McNamer’s Aviary (2021), an unexpectedly lyrical rumination: “She prayed for the groaning, hectically gorgeous, steaming world, which seemed, more and more often, to lurch and shudder on
Here’s a glimpse of some recent reads which lend themselves more to sampling, in a handful of reading sessions, than gobbling in longer periods of time. Not the books which require a sink-into-your-seat focus, the ones which afford the opportunity to window-gaze between pages. Recently I’ve been missing a
For my birthday this year, Mr BIP arranged for me to have a cake with a sentence from an Alice Munro story iced onto it: “The world would be grand, if it weren’t for the people.” It’s an interesting quotation in a year when the pandemic has made everyone
Those of you who are reading here now, but not reading Alistair MacLeod’s short stories, will probably only be interested in the first couple of paragraphs after this introduction. Feel free to skip past the section that I've titled The Underneath, written with those who know the story-or other
Crooks, Drain, Freeman, Mukasonga, and Philyaw Short Stories in January, February and March Whether in a dedicated collection or a magazine, these stories capture a variety of reading moods. This quarter, I returned to some favourite writers and also explored several new-to-me story writers.
