Partly because the humidity makes it hard to inhabit my own skin, this summer was a tough one for me. It felt like I started to read a dozen different collections of short stories—but never finished one. I’ve written about Carleigh Baker’s Last Woman (2024) and the Russian stories
In a loose way, these six books—suspense, horror, mystery—are arranged in the order I would read them through the course of a single day; the first two require full-on daylight, and the last I would read even after dusk (but it’s still a gripping story, though largely character-driven). For
Douglas Bruton’s Blue Postcards (2021) came to me via ILL (thanks to the Forest Hill branch of the Toronto Public Library) because Susan, Mme Bibi, Kaggsy and Simon all loved it; so I was expecting to enjoy it, but I was not expecting to find summer in it.
Today, talk of six books by Indigenous writers, including a novel, an illustrated children’s book, two books of poetry, and two books of non-fiction. These are works by Binnizá & Maya Ch'orti', Cree-Métis, Kanien’kehá:ka Ahkwesáhsne /Mohawk St. Regis, Kanien’kehá:ka, Wakeniáhton (Turtle Clan), and Mandan, Hidatsa & Arikara/Tsimshian writers.
As Rufus Redpen explains, in Maria Reva’s Endling, there is only one George Saunders. He’s the famous author who moves successfully between short- and long-form fiction, describing his lifetime of short-story writing as building custom yurts before he began construction on a mansion—a novel. “Oh, sure,” Saunders says: “I
