Setting Mary Swan's novella The Deep alongside her recent novel My Ghosts, the blues in their covers are rich and varied. The cover of one features statuary, a feminine form, opaque but graceful; the cover of the other showcases a butterfly, luminescent and fragile. They seem to intertwine. And one
Reading Craig Davidson's Cataract City took me somewhere else. You might think, if you have heard something of the novel, that I am about to say Niagara Falls. But as much as the novel is about two boys' coming-of-age in this environs, it is a study of how 'what-came-before' morphs and
From Lisa Moore's Caught: "He would not betray the innermost thing. He didn’t know exactly what the innermost thing was, except it hadn’t been touched in four years of incarceration. Come and get me. They couldn’t get him. It fluttered in and out of view, the innermost thing, consequential and
"There’s no backstitching in stories. Nothing can be locked in place." So says a character in Studio Saint-Ex, but readers of Ania Szado's second novel might disagree; she seems to have no trouble locking a good story in place. She began where all good stories begin, with a fascination. In
Twenty-two years ago, I clipped an article from a Toronto newspaper about the restoration of Sainte-Marie among the Hurons near Midland, Ontario. I had studied the history of the mission and the slaughter of the Jesuit priests when I was in elementary school, culminating in a vague understanding of it
