The Love Letter was longlisted in 1996, the year that Helen Dunmore's The Spell of Winter won the Orange Prize. The idea intrigued me straight away, even before I saw the 1999 film of the same name: a love letter addressed and signed ambiguously, discovered by a 42-year-old
Gordon j.h. Leeanders’ To Be Continued ECW Press, 2005 Read: Sitting at freshly-assembled dining-room table. Now we can seat 8 for a meal. Or one reader and one story collection. (It was a two-course read for me.) Warning: Even if you usually spread short story collections over time, you’ll be
Arnold Bennett, Riceyman Steps Grosset & Dunlap (1923) My experience with Arnold Bennett's fiction can be easily summed up: The Old Wives' Tale (1908). But what I lack in experience, I make up for in enthusiasm: I loved that novel. I was expecting it to be old-fashioned, dreary and a
Jeremy Mercer's Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co. St. Martin's Press, 2005 Well, how can you not like a book that begins with "It was a grey winter Sunday when I came to the bookstore." What better sort of grey winter Sunday could make such
Lewis Buzbee's The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop: A Memoir, A History Graywolf Press, 2006 Welcome to another bookish Friday. I've had Lewis Buzbee's slim volume on my shelf since it was published in hardcover. Which seems a little silly now -- having left it sitting for so long, when it can be
