In an effort to manage out-of-control stacks of reading, I try to choose disparate stories in the mass of current reads. Slipping Emily Schultz's The Blondes in with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah seemed like a good bet. A fantastic tale of a plague which seems to infect blonde women. Ifemelu
More than a hundred contributors chose books to fill their ideal bookshelves to make up this volume (edited by Thessaly La Force, artwork by Jane Mount). I spent weeks browsing through the pages, amused to find that sometimes the shelves of the writers I'd eagerly anticipated when I saw their
The title story of this collection, my favourite, "The Variance", is filled with so many details that it reads a little like a logic puzzle. (I like logic puzzles and short stories.) 2012; Doubleday - Random House, 2013 Sometimes the details have direct and practical significance, as with
As an object, this collection from Enfield & Wizenty is striking. And -- I can't tell you how much I love this detail -- it has a ribbon to mark your place. Great Plains Publications - Enfield & Wizenty, 2012 Immediately upon finishing the first story ("On the
Romola sang soprano, but perhaps an opera singer's life after she has retired is, by definition, incidental music. Or, perhaps the fragments of memory that swell and break for a 70-something woman living with dementia are incidental music. Or, the lost love she half-recalls? Maybe that is incidental. Inanna
