Stacey May Fowles’ Be Good Tightrope Books, 2007 The substance of this passage, from the early pages of Stacey May Fowles’ first novel, could as easily have been pulled from one of Lynn Coady’s stories, or from Darren Greer’s Still Life with June: “Life is a series of painful, tragic,
Terry Fallis’ The Best Laid Plans McClelland & Stewart, 2007 Daniel Addison arrived on Partliament Hill in Ottawa to work as a speech writer, “[n]aïve, innocent, and excited” and left five years later, “embittered, exhausted, and ineffably sad”. The Best Laid Plans begins after that, so you might expect a
Lynn Coady’s Play the Monster Blind Doubleday-Random House, 2000 Worthlessness. Disappointment. Boredom. Hellishness. Despair. The eleven stories in Lynn Coady’s debut collection (which followed her astonishingly successful debut novel Strange Heaven) are not for the faint-of-heart. Worthlessness, from “A Great Man’s Passing” “It was her fault because she had done
“Oh, I just don’t have time for fiction.” “I want to read about the Real World.” “Novels are a waste when you could be learning something.” Sentiments like these have infuriated me countless times because my reader’s heart belongs to fiction. I collect quotes like these that I imagine tossing out
Back at the beginning of December, the idea of reading Alice Munro’s stories from the beginning, through her most recent collection, Too Much Happiness, just seemed like a good idea. But now that I’ve actually begun. Now that it’s moved from the sphere of the possible to the sphere of
