In Imagining Ancient Women (2011), Annabel Lyon declares that “literary fiction is uniquely poised to perform an important ethical function in our lives—namely to teach us compassion”. She warns of the pitfalls: moral outrage, forbidden love, and excessive decoration. All of which she avoids in Consent. So much so,
I read Gil Adamson’s The Outlander (2007) in February 2009, on my daily subway commute, and on the afternoon that I was nearly finished reading, I started a conversation about it with another commuter, who was also reading it. I waited until I’d moved towards the door, prepared to
I’m even more likely to pick up dark and disturbing stories when the sun is beating down. This stems to my “discovery” of Stephen King in a teenaged summer, beginning with Night Shift and Skeleton Crew. There I was: lying on my back in the grass behind the rented
When variations on the 30-something-°-day populate the ten-day forecast, summer reading is ON. (That’s 80s and 90s, for those of us who still get hotter in °F.) Books like Daven McQueen’s The Invincible Summer of Juniper Jones and Taylor Hale’s The Summer I Drowned rise to the top of
The library classification data for The Outlaw Ocean suggests categories like Fisheries-Corrupt practices, Travel, Special interest, Adventure, True Crime. All of these seem correct and yet none of them seems right. This is just over 400 pages long – with another hundred pages of notes (sources, readings, digressions)
