When a passage on page two is just breathtakingly powerful, readers’ expectations soar. It seems impossible to imagine reading beyond this passage without stopping to reread, or not reading it aloud to a friend sitting alongside, or not tapping the stranger sitting next to you, pointing and saying “Check this out”.
Excerpt from Reading Journal: Knopf Canada, 2014 Last night I finished reading All My Puny Sorrows, and when I woke up this morning, I was weeping. This doesn’t reveal how the book ended, because I read more than half of it last night, half-skimming the first half that
Sean Michaels’ prose invites readers to participate in the relationship between sound and shape through the simple but beautiful language of Us Conductors. Random House of Canada, 2014 His images are simple and fresh, and they are momentarily disorienting – as beautiful things can be. “I didn’t laugh
The word 'goodish' entered my vocabulary thanks to an observation that Carol Shields makes of two female friends in The Republic of Love. (General increased usage of -ish also ensued.) "They love the word ‘goodish,’ as in goodish sunsets, goodish travel bargains, goodish men." The title and cover of Suzanne Sutherland's When
Consider this Baroque idea, the Doctrine of Affections. That a single movement of music should arouse a single emotion. Freehand Books, 2010 It's the perfect title for this collection, for readers can expect a series of intense and diverse emotional responses to each of Paul Headrick's twelve stories. The
