In collection reading, since Quarterly Stories: Winter 2013 I've read Susie Moloney's Things Withered, the latest installment of the Alice Munro reading project, B.J. Novak's One More Thing, and the most recent volume of Journey Prize stories. But mostly I've been dipping into single stories in recent months. Partly this was inspired by random samplings of the latest ReLit
With book in hand, readers will know this is a collection of short fiction marketed as horror stories. But that's a broad stroke; Dracula and The Stand are both frightening tales. In the hands of Susie Moloney, a horror story sometimes means gruesome and moist: "Brains and cranial fluid seeped
I am fond of specific Alice Munro collections: A Friend of My Youth because it was my first, Open Secrets because it was the impetus for a particularly good book club discussion some years ago, and Runaway. McClelland & Stewart, 2004 Runaway because I have a memory of reading it
The appeal of reading a book like Dominique Fortier’s Wonder swells and radiates as pages turn. McClelland & Stewart, 2014 The story begins (like Dennison Smith’s The Eye of the Day, another of my favourite books in this reading year) with a proverbial bang. But despite the eruption
You'd think that the heart of the story in The River Burns is the covered bridge. The cover. The marketing. And the Author's Note which launches the novel refers to the actual Wakefield Bridge fire. "Historical events inspired the novel's genesis; skeletal aspects are mirrored here; yet the gentle shifts to time
