For the past couple of weeks, I have been listening to Joseph Boyden's Through Black Spruce on my daily walks. I was walking in full summer, listening to descriptions of winter in Moose Factory in Northern Ontario. The clusters of cloud in the story were from the exhaust of snowmobiles in
Ins Choi's play, Kim's Convenience is already on my list of favourite reads for this year. House of Anansi, 2015 I know, I know, it's only August, but I am certain already (because it literally made me laugh out loud several times and then it made me cry). It
On the list of 10 Perfect Alice Munro sentences, recently selected by CBC, this is the first: "Every year, when you’re a child, you become a different person." It begs the question, "When does one stop becoming somebody new every year?" Perhaps after an event like the incident described in this
So many of the risks in "Deep-Holes" are either averted or declared meaningless. "Sally packed devilled eggs—something she hated to take on a picnic, because they were so messy." Nobody ate the devilled eggs anyway, so it didn't matter how messy they were. "Ham sandwiches, crab salad, lemon tarts—also a
A new Friday fugue, running through this month, considering the ways in which our working lives appear on the pages of novels and short stories. Wasn't I just talking about novels set in bookstores? Yup, in last Friday's post (here). Gabrielle Zevin's book fits perfectly on that shelf. Arsenal
