Is it something like a triangle? With happiness, unhappiness and love arranged with an equal distance between each point? Perhaps. Certainly there are triangles in "Fiction", shifting alliances and fractures. Love triangles. Happiness triangles. Just enough. Too much. The kind of happiness discussed in "Fiction" is different from that which
My progress through Gabrielle Roy's works has been slow but steady, and this month I requested one of the children's books, which I held out for myself as a reward for finishing six of her novels. My treat was to be Cliptail, but the only copy available in the public
Tomorrow, I will be on the move. So many of the books currently occupying a position in my stacks are bulky and heavy, that it was easy to choose amongst the skinny residents. I have one more story to read in Gabrielle Roy's The Road Past Altamont. There are only three in
A new Friday fugue, concluding this week, considering the ways in which our working lives appear on the pages of novels and short stories. (Previous weeks can be viewed here, here and here, if you're keen.) Riverhead, 2013 Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
Phyllis Rose took a year to read Proust and wrote her "memoir in real time". More recently, Rebecca Mead revisited Middlemarch and she, too, wrote a memoir which examined her own life in that context. In Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, Nina Sankovitch plunged into the classic Russian's work as part
