What is it about a title story? It always feels, to me, like the key to the collection. And while it’s true that sometimes a title story is my favourite in a collection, other times, as with “Dance of the Happy Shades”, I wondered why it was selected to bestow
Shifting past the halfway mark in this collection, I find myself as interested in drawing lines between stories as I am in following the lines drawn within the stories. And perhaps it’s partly because I have recently pulled my copy of The Lives of Girls and Women off my shelves
If I was trying to convince readers to try Alice Munro, choosing this sampling of three stories might not be the best way to approach the matter. Each is stuffed with sadness, with resignation and despair to season the blend. But it’s as though there is also a dash of
Mavis Gallant’s Home Truths Gage-Macmillan, 1981. I discovered Mavis Gallant’s stories when I was nearly twenty. I was working in a bookstore and there was a fresh display of New Canadian Library mass-market pocketbooks. (It was the same display that got me reading Alice Munro, but that, too, took some
Lynn Coady’s Play the Monster Blind Doubleday-Random House, 2000 Worthlessness. Disappointment. Boredom. Hellishness. Despair. The eleven stories in Lynn Coady’s debut collection (which followed her astonishingly successful debut novel Strange Heaven) are not for the faint-of-heart. Worthlessness, from “A Great Man’s Passing” “It was her fault because she had done
