I was introduced to Margaret Laurence as a student, by way of The Stone Angel, in high school English class. I don’t remember much of the related schoolwork, but I do remember my teacher announcing her death (in January 1987). He seemed uncomfortable when he spoke about it. I couldn’t tell
Camille Yarbrough's The Shimmershine Queens Putnam-Penguin 1989 When I've had one of those soulfully-exhausting days (or weeks), one of the things that I like to do is browse in the children's library. I have my favourite branches, but often this is a hasty act of desperation which involves stopping at
Carlos Maria Dominguez’s The House of Paper (2004) Trans. from the Spanish, Nick Caistor Illus. Peter Sis Harcourt, 2005 My first thought when it came to trying to describe this small, slim volume was that it was like Anne Fadiman's Ex Libris mixed with Bohumil Hrabal's Too Loud a Solitude. But that's not
Chris Adrian "The Warm Fuzzies" The New Yorker Fiction: 20 Under 40 September 27, 2010 issue Why You Might Choose to Not Read this Post: 1. You don't care for short stories; 2. You think The New Yorker is all pretentious-ish-ness; 3. Anything with the word Fuzzies in it can't
Cynthia Flood's The English Stories Biblioasis, 2009 The end of the first story in Cynthia Flood's collection of interconnected stories goes like this: "Sometimes she took off the lid and put her nose right into the box, to inhale." Readers only met Amanda Ellis nine pages ago, so you might think
