Delicate and deliberate, these stories are sometimes startling and always moving. In some, the darkness is overt and inescapable; in others, quietly pervasive and creeping. A passage from "Welcome to Paradise" seems to whisper of the author's motivations: "Even now I like ghost towns and abandoned houses, places that seem
In which there is talk of true stories and stories that fall between the cracks of imagined facts and probabilities. Kyo Maclear's Birds Art Life (2017) Arranged as though composed over a twelve-month period, this would seem to be the perfect book to read slowly, meditatively. To allow the pages
Alongside the most recent Mavis Gallant collection, I've been reading a variety of short stories, including a collection of African writers, Opening Spaces, edited by Yvonne Vera. The collection dates to 1999 and includes both well-known and emerging writers: The Girl Who Can - Ama Ata Aidoo (Ghana) Deciduous Gazettes
First, the matter of getting situated. In this, the largest country in Africa, geographically, nearly twice the size of Alaska: Sudan. Its peoples speak 134 different languages, more than 400 if one counts distinct dialects. It officially declared independence on January 1, 1956. North of Sudan is the Sahara
Reading this story might change your reading life forever. That's what happened to Peter Orner, whose essay on Mavis Gallant's stories is mesmerizing: "The Way Vivid, Way Underappreciated Short Stories of Mavis Gallant", published in The Atlantic's "By Heart" series. "The first story I read is called 'The Ice Wagon
