In which pages are turned, at a faster rate than usual. Character-soaked, but still fast-paced storytelling. Cherie Dimaline's The Marrow Thieves (2017) is set in a future in which the dominant culture has determined that the blood of indigenous peoples holds an inherent value for healing. Exploitation and genocide ensue. This
This story falls between some longer ones in Going Ashore, with Mavis Gallant's early and uncollected stories, "One Morning in May" and "A Day Like Any Other". Both stories in which young people's innocence moves into the shadows of experience. In the shorter stories I've been reading lately, "From Gamut to Yalta",
Continuing in the vein of "From Gamut to Yalta" and "Dido Flute, Spouse to Europe", in only four pages, Mavis Gallant presents a cursory view of a life. Background music for Siegfried and Charles Although ostensibly an exercise in objectivity, a writer's imagined review of a man's memoirs,
Presented as the "Addenda to a Major Biography", noted to be nearly 1000 pages long, these three pages are not a typical short story. Readers are left to assemble their impressions of Dido based on fragments of a relationship which occupied only a fragment of her life from a relational
Boundaries and borders, between countries and between stages of life: Andrée A. Michaud's Boundary darts across the dotted lines, back and forth, sedately in one moment and chillingly the next. Because the story revolves around the murders of two young women in the small community of Bondrée, questions of
