Those of you who are reading here now, but not reading Alistair MacLeod’s short stories, will probably only be interested in the first couple of paragraphs after this introduction. Feel free to skip past the section that I've titled The Underneath, written with those who know the story-or other
“I am completely enchanted by The Big Sea and certainly it is the best thing you have done,” Carl Van Vechten wrote to Langston Hughes in November 1939. He had stayed up late to finish reading: “Not feeling very well I stayed in night before last and started reading
During the past year, I’ve read sixty-three books, fiction and non-fiction, related to the climate crisis. Just this week, I finished Katłįà's (Catherine Lafferty's) 2020 novel Ndè-ti-yat’a (Land-Water-Sky)--an unstoppable read. Maybe this new habit has an element of contagion: have I convinced you to read one? Earlier in 2021,
Stories set in—and revolving around—Vietnam have appeared on BIP many times, like Marcelino Truong’s coming-of-age memoir in translation by David Homel: Such a Lovely Little War (2014; 2015) (his follow-up, Saigon Calling, brought the family to England). Also Robert Olen Butler’s Perfume River (2016) but to say much more
Although this project was motivated by a recent statistic reported from the 2020 election in the United States, I’ve been reading about slavery since I was a kid. But, first, I watched Cicely Tyson in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974) and A Woman Called Moses (1978) about
