Mavis Gallant’s Home Truths Gage-Macmillan, 1981. I discovered Mavis Gallant’s stories when I was nearly twenty. I was working in a bookstore and there was a fresh display of New Canadian Library mass-market pocketbooks. (It was the same display that got me reading Alice Munro, but that, too, took some
It was a bitterly cold, blustery day in January 2003. I started reading the book at my desk, which was under the eaves next to a small window. There was a small space heater humming near my feet because the walls up there were cold to the touch, and the
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
