Readers of Mavis Gallant’s early stories have endured a lot of unhappy spouses and unhappy children. In apartments and on beaches, in summer houses and on holiday, It’s hard enough; in confined quarters, it is stressful indeed. In “The Rejection” we have a divorced father and his daughter in
Do you ever feel the weight of your stack? Many of the books I've been reading have been rigorous and demanding. Commodore Ajith Boyagoda's story of imprisonment in Sri Lanka, Marcelino Truong's memories of coming-of-age in Vietnam between 1961 and 1963, Shirin Ebadi's work for human rights in Iran, Solmaz
"No one wants to hear what’s going on in some jailbird’s heart now do they?" It comes near the end of the novel, but I suspect that Joel Thomas Hynes took this idea as a challenge, that that's what inspired his Giller-Prize nominated novel We'll All Be Burnt in
Excerpt from reading journal: Nadia Bozak is the reason that I have copies of the three books in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy on my shelves. Books that I never planned to read, but I came across the idea that the works were somehow connected with her novels Orphan Love and
“We crave narrative,” Joe tells us. And the Reader who picks up Arjun Basu’s Waiting for the Man nods: a narrative craver. ECW Press, 2014 “We believe we are uninteresting without a compelling story.” But Joe himself no longer finds his story compelling. The Reader meets Joe when
