“It is August now, towards the end, and the weather can no longer be trusted.” The gentle rhythm in MacLeod’s sentence is responsible for its being a favourite of mine. Such an ordinary opening to such a startlingly subversive –and topical—story. With the findings of the IPCC report and
“I am speaking now of a July in the early 1970s and it is in the morning just after the sun has risen following a night of heavy rains.” The summer schedule for these stories is more crowded, so this story would fall near July and the next later
This year I re-directed my focus away from a couple of years of determinedly reading from backlists (so that new books comprised only about 30% of my reading) back to freshly published and forthcoming books.* What I hadn’t anticipated was how delicately I would need to balance my library
The climate crisis erupts regularly in my reading, in unexpected ways. In Natsumi Hoshino’s manga series for children, Plum Crazy, named for the household’s first cat, even the cats heard a news report and pawed at the light switches to reduce their energy consumption. (My laugh came out more
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
