When I was a girl, I was too afraid to watch the part of the Disney movie in which Penny is lowered into the darkness in a bucket. If I had actually read the stories on my bookshelf, I would have had great sympathy for the mice in the Prisoner's
I grew up loving the works of Margaret Atwood and Margaret Laurence and Alice Munro. Traditional? Perhaps. Maybe my CanLit taste is old-fashioned. And in their time, these were women who dared. Not 'but', 'and'. This remains their time. And beyond the page. In the recent furor surrounding the efforts to
My reading year began with a reread of The Radiant Way (1987), which begins with a New Year's party. The first time I read the novel, I was in my 20s and I hadn't yet read Virginia Woolf; this time I couldn't help but think of Mrs. Dalloway as the women
In Susan Hill's Howard's End Is on the Landing, she quotes a friend who says "We read Margaret Drabble to feel the zeitgeist, our daughters read Helen Simpson." (Their daughters' daughters might be reading Janine Alyson Young or Alex Leslie or Rivka Galchen or Eufemia Fantetti.) In the first story
Promise Falls has a history. You might not think so, but it matters. “Are we too insignificant up here: A couple of hours away from New York? Is that what we’re foolish enough to think? Let me tell you something, my friend. You want to strike fear into the hearts
