“I was big on grit,” she says in an interview* where she describes finding old pages of writing from her childhood and teenagehood. She wrote a novel about an ant, still unfinished. And there were musings on the Hungarian Revolution and despair. “I had an eye for lawn-litter and
Sometimes the books that affect us most profoundly are the most difficult to write about; this has been the case for me, with Wendy McGrath’s poems in The Beauty of Vultures, which was published in April this year—a collaborative work with photographer (and musician) Danny Miles. Not a week
Bigamy, fraud, prison: the life of Frederick P. Grove reads like a novel. His 1925 novel Settlers of the Marsh both does, and doesn’t, hint at the unconventional choices he made in his own life. In one sense, it feels like a quintessential early Canadian novel. It even begins
Partly because the humidity makes it hard to inhabit my own skin, this summer was a tough one for me. It felt like I started to read a dozen different collections of short stories—but never finished one. I’ve written about Carleigh Baker’s Last Woman (2024) and the Russian stories
You might recall that I filled my first #ShelfofMexico shortly after the current American administration renamed The Gulf of Mexico. There were some fabulous suggestions and all year, so far, I’ve been reading. (Shelf One is the first photo; I've already read all but one.) I knew that I
