I heard Madeleine Thien read from this collection in 2001 in a small library theatre in London, Ontario; I recall that she was very gracious and spoke of being honoured to appear with the other women who were reading that night. (I heard Joan Barfoot, Bonnie Burnard and Jane
June is at the heart of this collection of stories; she is the link, the thread of light through a series of dark scenes. She is our guide to the ‘burbs: “The picture perfect suburban dream with the groomed lawns, nine-to-five jobs, 2.5 children kind of places. Domino effect.
If The Cat’s Table (2011) was a slow and steady unravelling of a young boy’s memories, yarn taut and tidy, Warlight is a mass of moth-eaten fragments, remnants of a finely-crafted woollen garment pulled from a trunk. A thing of beauty, yes, but the devastation is the first thing
Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008) I thought the footnotes would make it fun (like in a Steven Haywood short story); I was more focussed on the ‘wondrous’ than the warning of brevity. In fact, Oscar’s life emerges from dictatorship and constricted choices, and you
In which there is talk of the slim stories which have travelled with me within the city, while bulkier volumes stayed home. Charles Dickens' Bleak House and John Ajvide Lindqvist's Harbor (Translated by Marlaine Delargy) are awkward travelling companions. As are some of the skinnies in my current stack,
