A few summers ago, I got hooked on playing dominoes. I’d had a set since I was a girl but I’d never learned how to play. Back then, I thought dominoes were things you lined up in a pattern on the floor, flicking the first one so that each
If you think you don’t like poetry, Simina Banu’s Pop will surprise you. Having just stumbled through a reading of W.B. Yeats’ 1919 The Tower, I approached Pop with that swelling sense of inadequacy that haunted me as a student, that I do not understand poetry. But what a
Yesterday, I chatted about one of my favourites from this year’s Giller Prize longlist. Tomorrow, I’ll be chatting about the most talked-about from this year’s longlist, Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, as part of #MARM Margaret Atwood Reading Month. So, today, the other books on the longlist, the ones I
“All raise hands, please, who remember Rosalia. (Camera on studio smiles.)” You remember Rosalia, right? We met her in “A Painful Affair”, this collection’s fourth story: the dedicated servant of Miss Mary Margaret Pugh. Miss Pugh’s artistic patronage is not-yet-transpired in “Larry” (Larry is her half-brother), it’s an already-transpired-fact
“I saw Maggie about a year ago. She says she’s leaving everything to an arts foundation,” says Maggie’s half-brother, Larry. He’s talking to his father. Who was married, at one time, to Maggie’s mother. Larry’s father remains nameless, the Elder Pugh. Just as he “has no real age”
