Although it was a challenge to find Kyoto within these four walls (without access to the public library, still in lockdown), it was easy to find Paris for May’s Here and Elsewhere. And if my calendar image looks familiar, it’s because a photograph of the same scene has frequently
Since I began this project of rereading through Mavis Gallant’s stories, in January 2017, I’ve had this story in the back of my mind, unable to place it. I should have suspected it would reside here, in my first Gallant collection. Instead, I had begun to wonder if it
Rereading Wayson Choy’s The Jade Peony (1995) is a blatant act of homage. When I first heard Choy read from his work, he was promoting his memoir Paper Shadows (1999) at a Pride event. He was reading with Marnie Woodrow and Sky Gilbert: one, a curly-haired slightly messy young
Having published one hundred and sixteen stories in The New Yorker, Mavis Gallant’s regular readers would have had to wait from April 15 until July 8 in 1985, to learn how life has been for the Carette sisters. The story opens like this: “The family’s experience of Raymond was
Some days I picked up Samar Yazbek’s A Woman in the Crossfire, to read only two pages, and set it aside. Other days I picked it up and forced myself to read a certain number of sections (being that it’s a diary). Afterwards, whether a couple of pages or
