The first volume of Maya Angelou's autobiography begins with Marguerite arriving in Stamps, Arkansas, at three years old, with her brother, Bailey, one year older, in the care of Miss. Annie Henderson, their grandmother ("Momma"). It moves from the store to the churchyard, from hymn-singing to beatings. It crosses time and space fluidly.
Conflicted: that describes my first impressions after meeting Pillow in Andrew Battershill's Giller-nominated novel of the same name,and it also describes his perspective on the world. It's hard to be Pillow, to see all the angles which converge and diverge simultaneously on any single thought he has. For instance: "Pillow
Sometimes I buy books for the stories on their pages; sometimes I buy them for the stories between the pages. My copy of Porcupines and China Dolls was purchased second-hand at the Trinity College booksale more than ten years ago. Because of a handful of folded sheets tucked inside the back
Holly Black's Modern Faerie Tales series begins with Tithe. I bought a copy of it some years ago for my niece, thinking there was just enough swearing and sexual tension to incite an interest in reading. (That wasn't entirely successful, but I did quite enjoy reading it myself. Not that
With a subject as vast as mythology, it seems impossible to consider distilling it into A Short History of Myth. Yet that is what Karen Armstrong has done for the first volume in the Canongate Myth Series. What seems equally impossible is condensing those ideas once more, into
