Listening to an interview with Amy Tan, for the Guardian book club, I was struck by the fact that she lifted many of the stories from her mother's life for the pages of her work. Yet, while reading Lives of the Family, it is easy to imagine so many of
Who is Agnes? Little, Brown and Company, 2013 "Criminal. The word hangs in the air. Heavy, unmoved by the bluster of the wind. I want to shake my head. That word does not belong to me, I want to say. It doesn’t fit me or who I am.
It was probably always a messy story, but at some point the focus for Donna Tartt's third novel shifted dramatically. As discussed in an interview with Jared Bland at the Appel Salon, the draft Tartt had been writing, which was set in Amsterdam and New York City, collided with a trip to Las
My last short story post was in Autumn 2013 and focussed on recently published collections (Rosemary Nixon's Are You Ready to be Lucky? Elisabeth de Mariaffi’s How to Get Along with Women, and Shaena Lambert’s Oh, My Darling). Cormorant Books, 2000 In recent weeks I have been dabbling in some volumes on my shelves,
Although the Journey Prize is now synonymous with the idea of quality short fiction in Canada, not everyone realizes that the prize was established out of James Michener's donation of his royalty earnings from his 1988 novel Journey. Michener's novel was set partly in northwestern Canada, but the stories in
