“I was big on grit,” she says in an interview* where she describes finding old pages of writing from her childhood and teenagehood. She wrote a novel about an ant, still unfinished. And there were musings on the Hungarian Revolution and despair. “I had an eye for lawn-litter and
In a 1990 interview* MA talks about writing The Edible Woman in a chaotic Vancouver apartment: papers strewn everywhere, piles only she could decipher, and very little furniture (including a card table loaned by Jane Rule). Not how you’d imagine writers working (chair, desk), she says. It was a
Bigamy, fraud, prison: the life of Frederick P. Grove reads like a novel. His 1925 novel Settlers of the Marsh both does, and doesn’t, hint at the unconventional choices he made in his own life. In one sense, it feels like a quintessential early Canadian novel. It even begins
Of the summer books I mentioned earlier, seven I’ve read, one was recalled to the library for another reader, and three are underway (the Rabagliati graphic novel, Seven Twilights and Jubilee). I also picked a children’s book to reread (a nostalgic favourite—Jean Little’s Stand in the Wind) and a
As Rufus Redpen explains, in Maria Reva’s Endling, there is only one George Saunders. He’s the famous author who moves successfully between short- and long-form fiction, describing his lifetime of short-story writing as building custom yurts before he began construction on a mansion—a novel. “Oh, sure,” Saunders says: “I
