This summer is a record-reading summer; the weather has been brilliantly cooperative and I have read more this summer than, well, possibly ever in a summer before. Perhaps not since girlhood days, when it was all about what time the library would open, whether I would have to wait until the
It doesn’t get much more obvious than stacking these truths on the book jacket: there it is. Knopf Canada, 2014 The Confabulist Steven Galloway For even though the noun more commonly associated with ‘confabulate’ is ‘confabulation’, what is most important here is not the story itself but the
These sentences are dappled across a two-page spread of Mariko and Jillian Tamaki’s This One Summer (2014), as though they are wafts of milkweed ink: House of Anansi, 2014 “The first time I ever saw a milkweed was on the beach at Awago. I thought they were magic
Days and days throughout this July have contained book after book after book: a swell of print. From graphic novels (revisiting the Game of Thrones saga in this medium) to short stories (lots of those!), from memoirs (I’ve just finished Zarqa Nawaz’s Laughing All the Way to the Mosque) to
These stories were chosen “to be read rather than merely admired, or even envied”, including five previously unpublished stories. Thirty years later, the list of contents conjures up echoes of the Giller Prize, Canada Reads, and even a Pulitzer. Frances Itani’s “Grandmother” “And she has long known what the rest of
