Kathleen Winter's Annabel House of Anansi, 2010 (Looking for a swallow rather than a full glass? ORANGE Squirt below.) Like Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing and Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, it’s impossible to imagine Kathleen Winter’s Annabel being set anywhere other than the landscape therein. “In Croyden Harbour human life came
Remember those book banners whose knickers were all twisted up over this collection? I bet this week’s stories, “Baptizing” and “Epilogue: The Photographer”, really got them going. Del has ::whispers:: met a boy. She’s still sorting out what that means. She’s still unsure what it means to be a boy.
Alina Bronsky’s Broken Glass Park (2008) Trans. from the German, Tim Mohr Europa Editions, 2010 I read the opening sentences of Broken Glass Park when I was walking home from the library. The temperature had warmed enough for me to have my mittens off, the sidewalks had melted and smoothed
Blindfolded, only hearing the prose, or seeing the opening lines pulled from the narrative, would you recognize these stories to be the work of Alice Munro based on the first few sentences alone? The opening of “Changes and Ceremonies”: Boys’ hate was dangerous, it was keen and bright, a miraculous
When I was browsing the library stacks the other day, looking for the next volume in Maya Angelou’s autobiography, I happened upon this: JoAnn McCaig’s Reading In: Alice Munro’s Archives. And isn’t that just how it happens? How stacks of library books get out of hand? But how could I
