“Everything written down these days and worth reading is oriented towards nostalgia,” one of the characters in Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch declares. How handy to have David Berry’s new book On Nostalgia within reach, to illustrate the enduring interest in the matter, decades later. (Cortázar’s novel was published in Spanish
In his introduction to Mavis Gallant’s Paris Stories (2002), Michael Ondaatje describes her Europe as a place of “shipwrecks” (a recurring word in this collection, he notes). Her characters are “permanent wanderers”, often from Canada and Eastern Europe, and not always from or in Paris, but Mavis Gallant
In a few weeks, Jean-Michel Fortier’s new novel The Electric Baths will be reviewed in the new issue of World Literature Today, translated by Katherine Hastings. A galloping read populated by an inordinate number of widows and tragic ends. There are some bloody bits but you're caught between gasping
When variations on the 30-something-°-day populate the ten-day forecast, summer reading is ON. (That’s 80s and 90s, for those of us who still get hotter in °F.) Books like Daven McQueen’s The Invincible Summer of Juniper Jones and Taylor Hale’s The Summer I Drowned rise to the top of
“‘Newborn, they’ve got these huge peckers,’ said Mr. Fenton. ‘I mean, really developed.’” When it comes to writing about Mavis Gallant’s short stories, I often want to begin with their first sentences. Sometimes there is such a swell of emotion at the story’s end, a marvelling at how entire
