The characters in Shani Mootoo’s fiction often carry a burden. Cereus Blooms at Night (1996) is a lyrical and painful story of reconciling past trauma with present-day understanding (and a personal favourite). In Moving Sideways Like a Crab (2014), one character believes that all they “learned about women and
Gallant, Gould, Jolley, Kenan, Proulx, and Walker Short Stories in July, August, and September Whether in a dedicated collection or a magazine, these stories capture a variety of reading moods. This quarter, I returned to four favourite writers and also explored two new-to-me story writers.
Ironically, I requested Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar (1983; translated by William Weaver, 1985) with Kyoto in mind, for the scene at the “garden of rocks and sand of the Ryoanji”: “The rectangular enclosure of colorless sand is flanked on three sides by walls surmounted by tiles, beyond which
Marion Poschmann’s The Pine Islands (2017; Trans. Jen Calleja 2020) was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2019. The jury describes it like this: “A quirky, unpredictable and darkly comic confrontation with mortality.” Her first book was published in Germany in 2002 and, since, her work has been
Within the first few pages of Watching You Without Me, I was reminded of why I enjoy Lynn Coady’s work so much, her capacity to inhabit characters so thoroughly. Here, we have Karen, who’s returned to Nova Scotia to settle matters with her developmentally disabled older sister, following their
