My last short story post was in Autumn 2013 and focussed on recently published collections (Rosemary Nixon's Are You Ready to be Lucky? Elisabeth de Mariaffi’s How to Get Along with Women, and Shaena Lambert’s Oh, My Darling). Cormorant Books, 2000 In recent weeks I have been dabbling in some volumes on my shelves,
Although the Journey Prize is now synonymous with the idea of quality short fiction in Canada, not everyone realizes that the prize was established out of James Michener's donation of his royalty earnings from his 1988 novel Journey. Michener's novel was set partly in northwestern Canada, but the stories in
After a lifetime of collecting, Mr. Joseph Herbert Neill sold 1,000 objects to the county on the condition that they open a museum and appoint him curator. This is the story I imagine lurking behind the Walley museum in the opening paragraphs of "The Love of a Good Woman", behind D.M.
One of the most charming elements of the collection of letters between Blanche Howard and Carol Shields is the extreme bookishness of it. While reading A Memoir of Friendship, I was constantly making notes and, in the end, more than half of these were about the books that the two
More than twenty years ago, I read Eleven Canadian Novelists in the public library, sharing one of the big wooden tables, traipsing back and forth from my chair to the stacks, fetching the authors' work as desired. Plume, 1971 I hadn't yet read my first Alice Munro book, but
