Boyles, Chen, Clerson, Eunyoung, Li, Ruffin, and So Short Stories in July, August, and September Whether in a dedicated collection or an anthology, these stories capture a variety of reading moods. This quarter, I returned to a favourite writer and also explored seven new-to-me story writers.
I’ve been to the islands in my summer reading this year: Norwegian, Atlantic Canadian, Jamaican, Greenlandian and Sri Lankan. Roy Jacobsen’s Ingrid trilogy landed in my stack thanks to a reading copy of White Shadow from Biblioasis, translated by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw. Partly because I liked the
“I am speaking now of a July in the early 1970s and it is in the morning just after the sun has risen following a night of heavy rains.” The summer schedule for these stories is more crowded, so this story would fall near July and the next later
Usually, this is where I say that those of you who are reading here now, but not reading Alistair MacLeod’s short stories, will probably only be interested in the first couple of paragraphs after this introduction. Saying, skip The Underneath. But not this time. What remains the same, however,
Stories set in—and revolving around—Vietnam have appeared on BIP many times, like Marcelino Truong’s coming-of-age memoir in translation by David Homel: Such a Lovely Little War (2014; 2015) (his follow-up, Saigon Calling, brought the family to England). Also Robert Olen Butler’s Perfume River (2016) but to say much more
