The reader of Wayne Grady's first novel is held in as careful an embrace as the woman in the dancing couple on Emancipation Day's cover. Doubleday Canada - Random House Canada 2013 There is a sense that each word of the story has been chosen deliberately, even without
Towards the end of 2012, I was overwhelmed by the idea of being just one indie-minded reader in a literary world dominated by mega-publishers and mega-retailers. I felt unsure how to affect change, how to best respond to the sense of despair swelling within my reading heart and mind. I
Even before I met Nora, the narrator of The Woman Upstairs, I had already brushed up against talk of her anger. Knopf - Random House, 2013 First, Claire Messud's NPR interview includes the author reading the novel's opening paragraphs. (That's the now-oft-quoted rant, which begins with "I'm a
I'm out of the burrow. Monitoring the conditions. Checking to see if I'm following my read-o-lutions and resolutions. August already? That's crazy-talk. First, Persist. In bookishness, I have been doing alright with this. One long work by each of Wilkie Collins, G.R.R. Martin, and Margaret Atwood offer themselves as proof.
The last story discussed here, "The Albanian Virgin", leaves the reader with a single, haunting question: which version of the events is the reader intended to believe? 1994; Penguin, 2007 Readers are left with uncertainty. Even the narrator does not weigh heavily on either side, indeed, it is
