What happens inside, behind closed doors, in private moments, and in minds and hearts: that's the stuff of Alix Ohlin's novel. House of Anansi, 2012 "'He wouldn’t let me in,' she said, 'and I refused to stay out.'" Mitch's mother says that of his father. She is not
Copernicus Avenue ends in a snarl of streetcar tracks. "We reached the bottom of the street where it widens into a multi-veined delta of streetcar tracks." Andrew J. Borkowski's Copernicus Avenue is a series of stories that intersect with each other, just as the rails from Queen Street, King Street, and the Avenue
In today's bookish chatter: a plateful of Rosemary Nixon's Kalila and two snack-sized servings of Britt Holmström's Leaving Berlin and George Elliot Clarke's Red. If Rosemary Nixon's Kalila came with a cover summary, many readers would put the book aside. And, yet, only a few pages into the story, the
These stories turn on moments in which their characters are yanked from their everyday existences. That ordinary, day-to-day life? It's there, and the reader understands its dimensions, but the focus is elsewhere. "Hard, steady work, and no money in it either. When there was fish, there was no price for
One might think that writers of bookish books would go on and on, produce vast treatises on their love of books and literature, but many bookish books are slim volumes. Consider Carlos Maria Dominguez's The House of Paper (2004), Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude (1976; Trans.
