One might say that the narrator of Margaret Drabble's novel is an anthropologist of sorts. Perhaps that would be misleading, however: "Anthropology is full of strange spirit stories, about shamans and witchcraft and night ridings and animal shape-shiftings, stories which hover between myth and fairytale and religion and tribal memories
This from Hugh MacLennan to young Marian Engel in 1956: "If I can be of any help to you, don't hesitate to write and tell me so. I'm cynical about theses, having done one myself, but I suppose they are necessary if you can avoid taking them too seriously." University
More than a hundred contributors chose books to fill their ideal bookshelves to make up this volume (edited by Thessaly La Force, artwork by Jane Mount). I spent weeks browsing through the pages, amused to find that sometimes the shelves of the writers I'd eagerly anticipated when I saw their
"No, drinking oneself to death took too long." Harper Collins, 2013 Ironically, Colleen thinks this almost at the end of Lauren B. Davis' The Empty Room. But once a reader has resolved to begin, the narrative is so tightly constructed that readers are as caught in the momentum
Alice Munro is capable of spinning readers away from the salient detail of Austin's death in a story like "Pictures of the Ice". 1990; Penguin, 1991 Yet, she is equally capable of writing an opening which cannot be set aside and which demands rereading as the story unfolds,
