“It is August now, towards the end, and the weather can no longer be trusted.” The gentle rhythm in MacLeod’s sentence is responsible for its being a favourite of mine. Such an ordinary opening to such a startlingly subversive –and topical—story. With the findings of the IPCC report and
Those of you who are reading here now, but not reading Alistair MacLeod’s short stories, will probably only be interested in the first couple of paragraphs after this introduction. Feel free to skip past the section that I've titled The Underneath, written with those who know the story-or other
Earlier this year, Karen and Lizzy hosted ReadIndies and it reminded me how many years had passed since an installment of my Fiercely Reading Indie project (the most extensive was my deep-dive into House of Anansi’s backlist). Maybe I’d slipped into devotedly reading from the Big Five, I wondered.
Nancy Johnson’s The Kindest Lie (2021) reminds me of Terry McMillan for its focus on Black working women’s lives and Brit Bennett’s The Mothers for its slant towards mothering. The novel looks back, specifically to the election of Barack Obama in 2008: “Their feet felt light and their chests,
It’s a time of “political and intellectual crisis” in The Little Company. Sound familiar? Drusilla Modjeska’s introduction situates readers in Dark’s depiction of ordinary life in Sydney and Katoomba, in this time of “recession, nuclear threat and more failed expectations” in Australia. The Little Company is Dark’s seventh novel,
