While Love and Forgetting was in my stack of current reads, I listened to the World Book Club's podcast edition of a discussion of Albert Camus' The Outsider. Camus is someone whose work I associate with formal study, not pleasure, but Harriet Gilbert's interviews draw me into subjects I don't
You might think Struan is an unlikely setting for a novel. A town you can walk through in under ten minutes (even on slippery wintry surfaces). Knopf Canada, 2013 "Walking from one end of Struan to the other takes less than ten minutes. If you kept walking south
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
Twenty-two years ago, I clipped an article from a Toronto newspaper about the restoration of Sainte-Marie among the Hurons near Midland, Ontario. I had studied the history of the mission and the slaughter of the Jesuit priests when I was in elementary school, culminating in a vague understanding of it
Jennifer Quist's Love Letters of the Angels of Death is a taut novel which pulls the reader into the story with only a few paragraphs. Not only through plot, though the first paragraph is a bold invitation to read on: "It was only a matter of time before we found human
