Two young women in Jazmina Barrera’s novel Cross Stitch (2021; Trans. Christina MacSweeney) find a list of the books their friend had planned to read and the copies of them she had gathered, after she has died. They “divvy up the books and tear the reading list in two.
Ipellie, Lindberg, and Saona Short Stories in October, November and December Whether in a dedicated collection or a magazine, short stories captureand create a variety of reading moods. This quarter, I returned to one favourite writer and also explored two new-to-me story writers.
Just when my thoughts were etching a loop as I struggled to describe Madeleine Thien’s new novel, The Book of Records, I came across this Joy Williams quotation*: “What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibility of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes.” That is, indeed,
Many people think of following the news as a responsibility, but this contrasting idea gave me pause, expressed in Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide (2025). Because priorities shift, during wartime, when your daily life is what other people are consuming as news—on their phones while waiting in line
Sometimes the books that affect us most profoundly are the most difficult to write about; this has been the case for me, with Wendy McGrath’s poems in The Beauty of Vultures, which was published in April this year—a collaborative work with photographer (and musician) Danny Miles. Not a week
