Shivan understands, years later, that his grandmother sees herself as the peréthi from the parable. She lives like a ghost, naked and hungry, surrounded by pleasures that she cannot enjoy. Doubleday - Random House, 2013 "Everything she touched, everything she loved, disintegrated in her hands." Readers benefit from Shivan's
You can imagine Harry Salter, the main character in Don Gillmor's second novel, nodding along with Murray. Random House Canada, 2013 Murray is actually a character in an Alice Munro story, looking back at his much-changed life, but the story is familiar. "Does it deserve to be called
It's the summer of 1974, twenty-five kilometres north of Quebec City, and eighteen-year-old Gerry Fostaty is on a cadet training assignment. Goose Lane Editions, 2011 A cadet training assignment on a Canadian Forces base? I know nothing of this world, beyond what I've gleaned from "Private Benjamin", "An
In the introduction to her Selected Stories, Mary Lavin wrote in 1981 of the process she used to choose the stories to be included. One from each of her eleven short story collections, she explains. Hoping that "readers would not be presented with a bookful of stories with which they
As is often the case with Alice Munro's story stories, details that a reader might overlook in everyday life take on a new significance. Take, for instance, gravel. Small chips of stone, one thinks. And, yet, gravel is actually "a loose aggregation of small water-worn or pounded stones". Although the pit
