Imagine a ribbon. Pinch a loop of it between your index finger and thumb. The small piece you grasp is where the story begins and ends, while in between recounting “the year of shocks”. We meet the Clairvoie family when son Luc has failed his course of study. Spectacularly
Continuing in the vein of "From Gamut to Yalta" and "Dido Flute, Spouse to Europe", in only four pages, Mavis Gallant presents a cursory view of a life. Background music for Siegfried and Charles Although ostensibly an exercise in objectivity, a writer's imagined review of a man's memoirs,
At the beginning of March, I was determined to keep my nose in a stack of backlisted books. Books like these are the kind that to keep my focus on my own shelves in this reading year. Chad Pelley’s Every Little Thing (2013) “Every day, every hour, really, it was a
Many aspects of "The Moons of Jupiter" recall elements of Rose's life in the connected stories of in Who Do You Think You Are? (The Beggar Maid). In both cases, the narrator is a divorced woman beyond her child-bearing years, with a career in the arts, facing later milestones in her life while
Albert, Grace and Vera are the visitors; Albert is Wilfred's brother, and Wilfred and Mildred are the married hosts. The brothers, Albert and Wilfred, haven't seen each other for thirty years. If circumstances had been different, the story might have been titled "Brothers", but it's titled "Visitors", emphasizing the unfamiliar,
