There is, about an hour's drive from Toronto, a small town called Paris, on the Grand River. I've visited it a couple of times and I have travelled through it, by train, countless times. Rarely, on one of those rail journeys, did I miss that broad curve of the tracks, the
She won the Edgar for it in 1956: Best Novel. (If you are looking for new reading lists, the Edgar Award's site is filled with temptations.) And it was the first of three, later awards being given for The Fiend in 1965 and Beyond This Point Are Monsters in 1971. (She would
February was a relatively light reading month for me, so there are some nearly-done books in the stack at the beginning of this month, along with new additions. Naomi Novik's Black Powder War, N.K. Jemisin's The Kingdom of the Gods, Baratunde Thurston's How to be Black and the Margaret Millar
From the age of twenty-eight, Mavis Gallant lived and wrote in Europe, writing about "Canadians, Americans, Australians, Eastern and Western Europeans and their distinctive social and cultural milieux": she was "a citizen of the world". On the edge of beginning a deliberate reading and rereading of her stories, I peeked
Readers familiar with Margaret Millar's suspense novels, will immediately recognize her style and language in Wives and Lovers. (Just yesterday I discussed Vanish in an Instant, another volume in the Syndicate reprint series.) "It was a shoebox of a room, with the ceiling pressed down on it like a lid, and
