Not one of them. Really? Not the woman vacationing with her lover? Or the young worker about to go home for Christmas Eve? Not the mother of teenagers choosing their eclairs? Or the young botany teacher who learned about plants from her father? Not the old friend who recites
In which there is talk of the slim stories which have travelled with me within the city, while bulkier volumes stayed home. Amitav Ghosh's Flood of Fire and Paul Auster's 4 3 2 1are awkward travelling companions. As are some of the skinnies in my current stack, like Iris Murdoch's
After William Maxwell retired from The New Yorker, he reread all the stories by the authors he had published; after rereading Mavis Gallant’s “The Pegnitz Junction”, he wrote her to apologize for not having published it in full. "'He wrote 'my mind must have been out for lunch.' What
"It is an attested fact that he was born in Mainz. Mainz is a place he passed through once, in a locked freight car when he was being transported through France with a convoy of prisoners." Willi and Ernst were prisoners of war together and in "Willi", Mavis Gallant's
Researching Dawn Dumont, to review her most recent collection, Glass Beads, this quote leapt out at me: "If you can laugh then you can survive until the solution arrives." (Room Magazine, interview with Theressa Slind) It's easy to dismiss funny books as light, insubstantial. To call them
