There are nearly 800 discussions about books that could be categorized as CanLit on this site, but only a few focus specifically on the act of writing: this quartet was inspired by the 11th Canadian Book Challenge, currently hosted by The Indextrious Reader. (Previous reading for the challenge has
Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008) I thought the footnotes would make it fun (like in a Steven Haywood short story); I was more focussed on the ‘wondrous’ than the warning of brevity. In fact, Oscar’s life emerges from dictatorship and constricted choices, and you
Not one of them. Really? Not the woman vacationing with her lover? Or the young worker about to go home for Christmas Eve? Not the mother of teenagers choosing their eclairs? Or the young botany teacher who learned about plants from her father? Not the old friend who recites
In which there is talk of the slim stories which have travelled with me within the city, while bulkier volumes stayed home. Amitav Ghosh's Flood of Fire and Paul Auster's 4 3 2 1are awkward travelling companions. As are some of the skinnies in my current stack, like Iris Murdoch's
After William Maxwell retired from The New Yorker, he reread all the stories by the authors he had published; after rereading Mavis Gallant’s “The Pegnitz Junction”, he wrote her to apologize for not having published it in full. "'He wrote 'my mind must have been out for lunch.' What
