Last year I read 11 of the longlisted titles for The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and with the recent announcement of the 2024 longlist I was prompted to reflect on 2023’s selections. Three of the short story collections I’ve already written about—Talia Laksmni Kolluri’s What We Fed to
So many of Mavis Gallant’s characters inhabit between spaces. Netta, too. Which is strange, because so many of Mavis Gallant’s other itinerant women are staying in hotels, but Netta is running one. And she is just as between as the rest of them. Once she said yes and, then,
This week, we are invited to pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title. "It can be a 'If you loved this book, read this!' or just two titles that you think would go well together. Maybe it’s a historical novel and you’d like to get the real
As a fan of Carrie Snyder's The Juliet Stories, I was wriggling in my seat over the mere idea of Girl Runner. But then the anxiety crept in: there would be no Juliet, and perhaps much of the magic was hers. Just as the same river can't be stepped in twice, an
Isn't there something satisfying about beginning to read someone's published diaries in a January, when those diaries begin in some other long-ago January? Dawn Powell's diaries have been on my shelves for more than a decade but suddenly, in this January, I felt compelled to begin reading them. It sat beside other
