This year I’m focusing on anthologies and stories in magazines. Partly because I have eleventy-billion issues of The New Yorker around here that I’ve only partially read; partly because I always say that I want to read more anthologies but then I choose other books instead (I’m reading two,
Ipellie, Lindberg, and Saona Short Stories in October, November and December Whether in a dedicated collection or a magazine, short stories captureand create a variety of reading moods. This quarter, I returned to one favourite writer and also explored two new-to-me story writers.
“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
Douglas Bruton’s Blue Postcards (2021) came to me via ILL (thanks to the Forest Hill branch of the Toronto Public Library) because Susan, Mme Bibi, Kaggsy and Simon all loved it; so I was expecting to enjoy it, but I was not expecting to find summer in it.
When I requested Dear Writer, Dear Actress, a collection of letters exchanged between Anton Chekov and Olga Knipper, I expected them to arrive when Bill and Bron and I were reading “Gooseberries”. (Our project page is here.) If they had, my note-taking would have revolved around connections with their friendship and
