We’re more than halfway through the month of #MARM and today is Margaret Atwood’s 80th birthday. Naomi and I are supposed to be deep into discussions about The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments (her spoiler-free launch of The Ts discussion is here). But I’ve still got my head in
There is a line in Steven Price’s 2016 novel, By Gaslight, which seems to suit his new novel generally: “Everything is about the dead.” And another which seems even more appropriate: “The truth that is found in a story is a different kind of truth, but it is not
Another writer might have titled this story “Summer Games”. But in using a French title, Gallant’s English readers are immediately, if only for a brief moment, inhabiting an unfamiliar place. We have a hint of what’s to come. We are to expect something like the collection’s first story, “By
When I first read The Handmaid’s Tale, I was a teenager. In a few years, I would start to keep records about my reading: a log and handwritten (or typed( passages that I favoured along the way. The log in a notebook (usually practical rather than pretty) and the
Some might be surprised that Mavis Gallant gets children, that she can as easily climb inside their view on the world as she does. I'm thinking about stories like About Geneva and The Rejection. But these children feel apart from the others around them, as though their relationships with
