It occurred to me to keep The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu as a novella for November. But when I was rushing to leave the house one afternoon, and returned because I’d forgotten my wallet, I slipped TEoKN into my bag on a whim. So, naturally that’s what I read
Recently I’ve had such a great experience with the 2024 Best volumes that Biblioasis publishes annually featuring Canadian writers, that a casual chat between Rebecca and me, about how Lauren Groff had edited the 2023 O.Henry Prize Winners’ volume in 2023, inspired me to track down a copy via
Bucak, Irving, Lahiri, Ndiaye, and Towles Appealing to a variety of reading tastes: Trendy Translations, Honed and Haunting Trying something a little different with the Quarterly format. For most of the collections, I’ll summarise them in five sentences, followed by a quotation. Except for
Growing up, reading was a solitary activity. Even when I was lucky enough to live near someone else who had a similar connection to books and stories, we never did that together: we played. We might swap books, under the best of circumstances, but we never had our own
Louise Erdrich and Barbara Kingsolver, Amy Tan and Elizabeth Strout: these are some of the writers whose stories about parenting, and being parented, stand out in my mind. Claudia Dey’s fiction could be included here, too, although her stories spiral around alienation and abandonment—the ways in which those who
