This will be the first of three posts spiralling around notes made while reading Do Not Say We Have Nothing. Each with ten parts. Thirty segments. As though my post is the aria and the thirty segments are the variations. In recognition of the importance which Bach's Goldberg Variations holds
Many writers suggest that a motivation for telling stories is to set things in order, to make sense of what seems senseless. Little wonder that so many novels are preoccupied with loss and absence, abandonment and grief. In Melanie Mah's The Sweetest One, Chris (Chrysler) Wong thinks maybe she's cursed.
In the wake of my IFOA reading list and the literary prizelists of the season, my November reading felt relatively whimsical. Without duedates attached to the majority of my reading, it was a pleasure to slip into volumes which had sat untouched in recent weeks. Each of these three volumes covers,
This is the award's 42nd anniversary and the prize is announced on the evening of October 11, 2016 at the Bram and Bluma Appel Salon in the Toronto Reference Library. This year's finalists for the 2016 Toronto Book Awards are Howard Akler's Men of Action (a memoir), Ann Y.K. Choi's Kay’s Lucky Coin Variety (a novel), The
Sometimes, it's clear who the bad guys are. Sometimes they're clearly drawn, not only unsavoury, but also unprincipled. Like the misogynists who people the Signy Shepherd series by Susan Philpott, in which women are rescued from life-threatening situations by other women working a type of Underground Railroad, called The Line. (Blown
