Douglas Bruton’s Blue Postcards (2021) came to me via ILL (thanks to the Forest Hill branch of the Toronto Public Library) because Susan, Mme Bibi, Kaggsy and Simon all loved it; so I was expecting to enjoy it, but I was not expecting to find summer in it.
When I requested Dear Writer, Dear Actress, a collection of letters exchanged between Anton Chekov and Olga Knipper, I expected them to arrive when Bill and Bron and I were reading “Gooseberries”. (Our project page is here.) If they had, my note-taking would have revolved around connections with their friendship and
There is just one more story left in our project—and it’s the shortest, only six pages, the second by Tolstoy. In the course of looking for a cover image, I learned that it was published after Tolstoy’s death, and that it was based on a real person. (Inadvertently, I
I discovered May Sarton (1912-1995) on the shelves of the local women’s bookstore. You know I covet “sets” and, even though her books were not properly so, there was consistency in their Norton editions: the tidy little pocketbook novels with a splash of colour in a design at the
On the evening I read this short story, I was also reading May Sarton’s 1938 novel Single Hound (more about that tomorrow), in which one character affectionately calls another a “gooseberry”. Even though there’s no such moment in Chekov’s short story and, indeed, the gooseberries themselves are a disappointment—I
