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.
Last year, on six weekends, I posed about being Buried in ReLit Print, sampling the novels, short stories and poetry (which is adventurous for me) on the longlists. The longlists for the 2012 ReLit Awards were announced last Tuesday and I began making my reading plans that morning. Several of
Reflecting a fictional timeline into the reader's world adds another layer of credibility to the tale. It's that much easier to imagine the characters in "Labor Day Dinner" taking shape, when you're reading it as Labour Day weekend approaches. Structurally, the story is complex, although at first glance it is
I wish that I could introduce the narrator of the last story, "Bardon Bus", to Prue. I like to imagine them sitting together in a cozy neighbourhood bar -- nothing fancy, rather the sort of bar to which people go to be heard rather than to be seen -- in
