It was probably always a messy story, but at some point the focus for Donna Tartt's third novel shifted dramatically. As discussed in an interview with Jared Bland at the Appel Salon, the draft Tartt had been writing, which was set in Amsterdam and New York City, collided with a trip to Las
The evening in the Appel Salon at the Toronto Reference Library begins with a sincere expression of enthusiasm on the part of the interviewer, introducing and welcoming the author. Not rote expression of interest or distant admiration, but a sense of true excitement as Jared Bland takes his seat, and
An engrossing story, a compelling narrative voice: Three Souls is an easy book to recommend. Because of the setting and romantic elements of the story, it's tempting to draw comparisons with the novels of Amy Tan and Ai Mi. Given the readability, one might think of Sue Monk Kidd's The
Reading Craig Davidson's Cataract City took me somewhere else. You might think, if you have heard something of the novel, that I am about to say Niagara Falls. But as much as the novel is about two boys' coming-of-age in this environs, it is a study of how 'what-came-before' morphs and
One might say that the narrator of Margaret Drabble's novel is an anthropologist of sorts. Perhaps that would be misleading, however: "Anthropology is full of strange spirit stories, about shamans and witchcraft and night ridings and animal shape-shiftings, stories which hover between myth and fairytale and religion and tribal memories
