My stacks for this month are works-in-progress. Because even though we are two weeks into October now, my inner calendar is still hovering near the beginning of September. So, part of me still thinks that I will have more time to read more of the books that I'd dreamed of
"I've always conceived of language as music," says Tomson Highway: musician, playwright, novelist. "I play Chopin still, but in Cree," he continues. Then, more than a decade later, it is as though he continues this conversation, in A Tale of Monstrous Extravagance. This slim volume is subtitled on "Imagining Multilingualism", which
If the idea of experimental or innovative short stories makes you squirm, even though you are simultaneously bored with more traditional structure, Not Anyone’s Anything belongs on your bookshelf. Ian Williams puts relationships at the core of his work and this fiction collection exhibits this tendency as well. I also
The first volume of his Toronto trilogy introduces readers to Bernice Leach, who has left Barbados to work in Toronto as a housekeeper in an upscale neighbourhood in the 1960s. She has left behind a son and his father, as well as a mother and a sister, and she is
I pulled André Alexis' Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa (1994) off my shelf when Fifteen Dogs was nominated for the Toronto Book Award (since then, FD has also been nominated for the Giller Prize and the Rogers' Writers' Trust Fiction Award). There aren't any notable four-legged characters, but the collection is fascinating.
