“Surfacing changed a lot. Bodily Harm was a pretty fast write. Handmaid’s Tale was a fast write. Lady Oracle took me a long time because there are so many people and it’s complex. I think Surfacing changed the most from beginning to end.” “Freeforall” leaves me craving an in-a-nutshell
“It’s November; it’s almost bedtime”—in autumn 1919, when older Iris remembers reading her ABCs as a child, and determines that she’s never been the kind of person who could drive off a bridge. Neither she nor her mother was that sort, but her father could have and, it seems
“I was big on grit,” she says in an interview* where she describes finding old pages of writing from her childhood and teenagehood. She wrote a novel about an ant, still unfinished. And there were musings on the Hungarian Revolution and despair. “I had an eye for lawn-litter and
Bigamy, fraud, prison: the life of Frederick P. Grove reads like a novel. His 1925 novel Settlers of the Marsh both does, and doesn’t, hint at the unconventional choices he made in his own life. In one sense, it feels like a quintessential early Canadian novel. It even begins
New in paperback last month, I just squeaked in with my bought-in-hardcover read of Nalo Hopkinson’s Blackheart Man. I wanted to read it for fun—no notes—and carried it around in my stack for most of the past year, while other books nudged in line in front. The opening chapter
