The image of the father in this story, unable to sleep, counting his sons-in-law instead of sheep, makes me smile. The way that he matches his memory of their faces with the litany of names, his uncertainty about the fifth, his debates over which of them is married to
My read-o-lutions for 2019 are much as they were for the past year: keep on reading on. (2018 was a great reading year!) Except more non-fiction, more poetry, more letters, more graphic novels and comics. More storybooks, writers' biographies and histories. The underlying theme? More. But not necessarily more
There have been many Christmases in Mazo de la Roche’s novels, too: not quite a hundred, but several. “Ninety-nine Christmases had been celebrated at Jalna. In its first Christmas Philip and Adeline Whiteoak had been young people and their three children infants. Now all those five were in their
At first it is surprising. To come across the word ‘defenestration’ in a Mavis Gallant story. Often these are inward-looking stories, detailed and expansive glimpses into the interior lives of quiet – and often solitary – characters. Someone drives too quickly or protests the contents of a sermon, someone
Elisabeth Sanxay Holding’s The Blank Wall (1947) “It was a mystery story she had got out of the lending library for her father, and she was not fond of mystery stories. Nobody in them ever seems to feel sorry about murders, she had said.” How unfortunate that Lucia is
