In today's bookish chatter: a plateful of Rosemary Nixon's Kalila and two snack-sized servings of Britt Holmström's Leaving Berlin and George Elliot Clarke's Red. If Rosemary Nixon's Kalila came with a cover summary, many readers would put the book aside. And, yet, only a few pages into the story, the
It is a basic human need. “Our need to know where we come from, to connect it to who we are and where we’re going.” Harper Collins, 2012 Ruth becomes aware of this need, first, when she is six years old, but that is just the beginning. It
Just how old are they, these women in Alice Munro's stories, these women in "Hard-Luck Stories" in particular. "Over the past couple of years I have experienced moments of disbelief when I meet my friends in public. They look older than I think they should." These stories still feel current
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.
