When I read the description of Coleman Hill, I thought of it more as a story about place than about family. (I first read about it when it made the Carol Shields Prize longlist—eventually it was shortlisted and, yes, I’ll soon update my progress on that reading too—and it
Past the mid-point of the reading year, I notice that there are some books I finished reading some time ago, lingering. Just, around. Left in innocuous places as though I just finished reading them there. Finally, when I found a place for Khadija Abdalla Bajaber’s novel (on the shelf
Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning (2016) is a doorstopper of a book that grew out of his desire to write an introductory chapter to a book about Black Studies programs in American (i.e. in the United States) universities and colleges. When his chapter was 90 pages long,
Growing up, reading was a solitary activity. Even when I was lucky enough to live near someone else who had a similar connection to books and stories, we never did that together: we played. We might swap books, under the best of circumstances, but we never had our own
Louise Erdrich and Barbara Kingsolver, Amy Tan and Elizabeth Strout: these are some of the writers whose stories about parenting, and being parented, stand out in my mind. Claudia Dey’s fiction could be included here, too, although her stories spiral around alienation and abandonment—the ways in which those who
