This is the final story in the single volume of Alistair MacLeod's collected stories, Island (if you're discovering this project after it's complete, you will be able to find the schedule for this reading project here). After spending a little more than a year with Alistair MacLeod’s short stories,
Stories like Alistair MacLeod’s are often described as timeless, but many of them, like “Second Spring”, feel time-full. Immediately, MacLeod situates readers in time: “It was the summer after the seventh grade that saw me truly smitten with the calf club wish.” Then, he invites readers to fall into
It’s ironic, that while so many are longing to safely travel these days, others are longing to stay put and continue to safely reside in their homelands. On the page, throughout last year, I travelled to twelve different cities, prompted by a local artist’s desk calendar, which inspired a
“All of us are better when we are loved.” The film Reading Alistair MacLeod begins with this quotation. It’s a lovely way to summarize his oeuvre. In the film, Colm Tóibín speaks of the process of discovering MacLeod’s work through editing the Modern Library’s Best 200 Writers project; he
In the past few weeks, I’ve read a few books for this reading project; at this rate, I will easily read the 32 books I’m aiming for (representing the percentage of people in one American state, who voted in November 2020 on a bill which maintained the legal option to
