So many of the risks in "Deep-Holes" are either averted or declared meaningless. "Sally packed devilled eggs—something she hated to take on a picnic, because they were so messy." Nobody ate the devilled eggs anyway, so it didn't matter how messy they were. "Ham sandwiches, crab salad, lemon tarts—also a
It's not impossible to find them, but if you read a lot of literary fiction, the novels which contain humour are outnumbered. Each of these books actually addresses a serious issue (or touches upon it, for Susan Juby's novel doesn't delve very deeply): global warming and habitat erosion, family farm
Things that you can slip between. They are often 'new' in nature. Perspectives transform. If I was playing $30,000 Pyramid, I might think such things, in response to the idea of 'dimensions'. At the heart of Alice Munro's "Dimensions": a woman who is fundamentally altered, facing a 'new' future, slipping
Phyllis Rose took a year to read Proust and wrote her "memoir in real time". More recently, Rebecca Mead revisited Middlemarch and she, too, wrote a memoir which examined her own life in that context. In Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, Nina Sankovitch plunged into the classic Russian's work as part
The Laidlaws have left the Ettrick Valley in Scotland behind, that parish with "no advantages", but the family members also have left behind "long, outspoken, sometimes outrageous letters, and detailed recollections" which have inspired Alice Munro to narrate the experiences of her ancestors. McClelland & Stewart, 2006 But
