Consider this Baroque idea, the Doctrine of Affections. That a single movement of music should arouse a single emotion. Freehand Books, 2010 It's the perfect title for this collection, for readers can expect a series of intense and diverse emotional responses to each of Paul Headrick's twelve stories. The
In searching for an image for the last story discussed here, "A Wilderness Station", I came upon a wonderfully long and chatty Paris Review interview with Alice Munro.* Something she says about her reading came to mind when I had finished "Spaceships Have Landed". "Reading was my life really until
Last Saturday, I sat down, spoiled with treats from the farmers' market, to re-read Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake. Today is the day I get reacquainted with The Year of the Flood. And I'm certainly not the only one who's spending time with the books in the trilogy this weekend; here's
Before I began reading Bone and Bread, I read Mother Superior, Saleema Nawaz's debut, a collection of stories. House of Anansi, 2013 About "Bloodlines", I noted: "S keeps Khalsa (pure, according to Sikh law) and B does not, so B grows larger and S grows smaller, above a Montreal bagel
Omens begins with an author's note that promises literary Easter eggs. Before the story even begins. Random House Canada, 2013 So, if readers choose, there are mysteries to be unravelled even before the narrator can make sense of them herself, hidden by the author deliberately. She acknowledges that
