"It is an attested fact that he was born in Mainz. Mainz is a place he passed through once, in a locked freight car when he was being transported through France with a convoy of prisoners." Willi and Ernst were prisoners of war together and in "Willi", Mavis Gallant's
Researching Dawn Dumont, to review her most recent collection, Glass Beads, this quote leapt out at me: "If you can laugh then you can survive until the solution arrives." (Room Magazine, interview with Theressa Slind) It's easy to dismiss funny books as light, insubstantial. To call them
“I served coffee in cups with Liberté and Patrie and a green-and-white shield of the Vaud on them. The parents of a pupil had bought them in Montreux for me once." Erika is a school-teacher, in a village a half-day's train ride from Montreux, Switzerland. She teaches girls elementary
There are many amazing stories about moving from somewhere to elsewhere, about the process of elsewhere becoming somewhere. Take Rabindranath Maharaj's The Amazing Absorbing Boy - literally, amazing. It's right there on the cover. It's a real favourite of mine, in which seventeen-year-old Samuel reads comic books in Trinidad to
There is not so much sadness in this story. And, dessert is served. But there is nothing sugary about the relationship between Helena and the police commissioner. Even though they have been "friends forever". "On a silver dish, and on still another pink cloth, this one embroidered, are wedges
