Ater a year of new-new-new, January has been filled with the familiar, the known. It's not been about making new-shiny-library-residing friends, but about becoming better acquainted with long-time residents of my own bookshelves, remembering what drew particular authors onto my MRE (MustReadEverything) list and particular books onto my shelves. Have
As much as these stories focus on solitary characters who observe, from the margins, they long for something else; Walt and Mr. Jones are ultimately preoccupied with relationships. Goose Lane Editions, 2014 Margaret Sweatman's Mr. Jones openly confronts duplicity. "His life had been contrary, a series of duplications: two homes; a father who’d
With chapters named for the days of the week in Street Angel and with specific dates in a given week in Adult Onset, these two novels seem to make ideal reading companions. Ultimately, much of literary fiction is preoccupied with time. Whether it is Molly Bloom's day in James Joyce's
As a fan of Carrie Snyder's The Juliet Stories, I was wriggling in my seat over the mere idea of Girl Runner. But then the anxiety crept in: there would be no Juliet, and perhaps much of the magic was hers. Just as the same river can't be stepped in twice, an
Crimes of the past lurk beneath the stories in Ian Weir's Will Starling and Linden MacIntyre's Punishment and the main characters lurch towards and stumble into confrontations and altercations with life-long repercussions. Goose Lane Editions, 2014 These are both dark tales, but Ian Weir's novel is literally and figuratively so: "And
