In anticipation of the publication of her debut novel, “Eva Crocker shares a story about her mother, Lisa Moore”. In the broadest sense, her piece reveals the importance of childhood memories and how, even years later, events that occured when we are young, fundamentally influence our responses to events
If you think you don’t like poetry, Simina Banu’s Pop will surprise you. Having just stumbled through a reading of W.B. Yeats’ 1919 The Tower, I approached Pop with that swelling sense of inadequacy that haunted me as a student, that I do not understand poetry. But what a
Annie Proulx’s Bird Cloud (2011) immediately invites readers into Wyoming: “The blue-white road twists like an overturned snake showing its belly.” She describes the dust and the sage-brush and how it’s impossible not to think of “old ash-spewing volcanoes” as you move through Wyoming with its powdery soil. “The
My experience reading David Bergen runs the gamut. When I first read The Time in Between, I felt disengaged from the story. Years later, stuck in a waiting room with The Matter with Morris (2010), I recognized layers to his storytelling which I’d missed before. With The Age of
“‘Newborn, they’ve got these huge peckers,’ said Mr. Fenton. ‘I mean, really developed.’” When it comes to writing about Mavis Gallant’s short stories, I often want to begin with their first sentences. Sometimes there is such a swell of emotion at the story’s end, a marvelling at how entire
