Could be that "Carried Away" is my favourite Alice Munro story. 1994; Penguin, 1999 Not only because Louisa is a librarian. (But that certainly helps.) "The Librarian’s desk was in the archway between the front and back rooms. The books were on shelves set in rows in the
Shivan understands, years later, that his grandmother sees herself as the peréthi from the parable. She lives like a ghost, naked and hungry, surrounded by pleasures that she cannot enjoy. Doubleday - Random House, 2013 "Everything she touched, everything she loved, disintegrated in her hands." Readers benefit from Shivan's
You can imagine Harry Salter, the main character in Don Gillmor's second novel, nodding along with Murray. Random House Canada, 2013 Murray is actually a character in an Alice Munro story, looking back at his much-changed life, but the story is familiar. "Does it deserve to be called
It's the summer of 1974, twenty-five kilometres north of Quebec City, and eighteen-year-old Gerry Fostaty is on a cadet training assignment. Goose Lane Editions, 2011 A cadet training assignment on a Canadian Forces base? I know nothing of this world, beyond what I've gleaned from "Private Benjamin", "An
In the introduction to her Selected Stories, Mary Lavin wrote in 1981 of the process she used to choose the stories to be included. One from each of her eleven short story collections, she explains. Hoping that "readers would not be presented with a bookful of stories with which they
