O’Connor’s religiosity is inescapable. When she was studying at Iowa, she attended morning mass daily. In her prayer journal, she clearly requests spiritual intervention to guide her craft. While I do not gravitate towards the meditative passages and debates in her letters about her Catholicism – and often skim
Having published one hundred and sixteen stories in The New Yorker, Mavis Gallant’s regular readers would have had to wait from April 15 until July 8 in 1985, to learn how life has been for the Carette sisters. The story opens like this: “The family’s experience of Raymond was
Some days I picked up Samar Yazbek’s A Woman in the Crossfire, to read only two pages, and set it aside. Other days I picked it up and forced myself to read a certain number of sections (being that it’s a diary). Afterwards, whether a couple of pages or
In the previous story, Berthe and Marie were six and four years old, but now they are twenty-two and twenty, when the Carette family is moving house once again. Having moved around the same neighbourhood every few seasons, they and their mother are signing a two-year lease for the
Shortly after I was old enough to peruse the magazines and newspapers that came to the houses of older family members, I discovered the wonders of the Columbia House Record Company and the Quality Paperback Bookclub via their advertisements. Both of these catalogue businesses offered tantalizing deals to new
