This will be the first of three posts spiralling around notes made while reading Do Not Say We Have Nothing. Each with ten parts. Thirty segments. As though my post is the aria and the thirty segments are the variations. In recognition of the importance which Bach's Goldberg Variations holds
Conflicted: that describes my first impressions after meeting Pillow in Andrew Battershill's Giller-nominated novel of the same name,and it also describes his perspective on the world. It's hard to be Pillow, to see all the angles which converge and diverge simultaneously on any single thought he has. For instance: "Pillow
"I do know that missing is a feeling," Ruby announces, in Riel Nason's debut, The Town that Drowned. Is it? It's true for Ruby, and her story is preoccupied with what is being lost, a chronological tale rooted in the moments of losing. At first glance, it seems as though Lydia Perović's All
Massacre, killer, murder: when these words appear on a novel's first page, readers are fore-warned. And, yet, the first third of Sara Taylor's Boring Girls (2015) is a coming-of-age story. "It was becoming more and more apparent that I had been right all along. No one could truly understand me, unless they got
This debut collection is filled with sensory detail. From brisket and chicken soup to gefilte fish and borscht. From paint-by-number clowns to lacy pillow-slips. From red-striped deck chairs to weathered shutters. Inanna Publications, 2016 Whether it's Debussy or lyrics from "Oklahoma", the details matter. But Aspects of Nature is actually preoccupied
