“Everything written down these days and worth reading is oriented towards nostalgia,” one of the characters in Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch declares. How handy to have David Berry’s new book On Nostalgia within reach, to illustrate the enduring interest in the matter, decades later. (Cortázar’s novel was published in Spanish
In his introduction to Mavis Gallant’s Paris Stories (2002), Michael Ondaatje describes her Europe as a place of “shipwrecks” (a recurring word in this collection, he notes). Her characters are “permanent wanderers”, often from Canada and Eastern Europe, and not always from or in Paris, but Mavis Gallant
In a few weeks, Jean-Michel Fortier’s new novel The Electric Baths will be reviewed in the new issue of World Literature Today, translated by Katherine Hastings. A galloping read populated by an inordinate number of widows and tragic ends. There are some bloody bits but you're caught between gasping
Have you been on the edge of your seat? The fourth and last of my planned posts on Flannery O’Connor has been delayed (the first, second, and third were published weeks ago) while library transfers were pending. Meanwhile, a new documentary has also been released, although currently only available
A lot of readers discover Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca as teenagers, but I was fully grown and reading books inspired by browsing the local feminist bookshop, writers like Audre Lorde and Marilyn Frye, bell hooks and Gloria Alzandúa. In my stacks that year, 87% of the books were
