Anosh Irani's "Circus Wedding" appears in the Spring/Summer 2017 issue of Eighteen Bridges, a fabulous magazine. His novel, The Parcel, also considers voices which are often pushed to the margins. Here, too, Raju inhabits a precarious existence. Here too, Anosh Irani takes a small character and reveals their big dreams.
"My name is Renée. I am fifty-four years old. For twenty-seven years I have been the concierge at number 7, rue de Grenelle, a fine hôtel particulier with a courtyard and private gardens, divided into eight luxury apartments …" In Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog, readers cosy up
The first story in this Mavis Gallant reading project was "The Other Paris", the title story in her first collection. Therein, a young woman's dreams of Paris fell through (with her dreams of the romance she had imagined). Even after she became engaged to be married, Carol was weary of
In which pages are turned, at a faster rate than usual. Character-soaked, but still fast-paced storytelling. Cherie Dimaline's The Marrow Thieves (2017) is set in a future in which the dominant culture has determined that the blood of indigenous peoples holds an inherent value for healing. Exploitation and genocide ensue. This
This story falls between some longer ones in Going Ashore, with Mavis Gallant's early and uncollected stories, "One Morning in May" and "A Day Like Any Other". Both stories in which young people's innocence moves into the shadows of experience. In the shorter stories I've been reading lately, "From Gamut to Yalta",
