Jinny has been standing on shifting ground. Expectations are thwarted: these are times of transformation. This was true, too, in "Gravel" and in "Oh What Avails". But there she is: the space in which she is standing shifts both literally and metaphorically. Things have been all-a-shift for some time now.
In playing the game, a girl writes the name of a boy beside her own name, crosses out the letters in common and counts off the various states of being: "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage". This is what matters: her relationship with a man. And, reading it that way, it seems
When Penelope Lively was interviewed by Emma Donoghue in 2003, the author was tickled to have her books for children acknowledged; her writing for children was routinely dismissed and she explained that she now felt quite distanced from it. The news of this dismissal shocked me because I came of
So many of my favourite writers will be appearing at this year's International Festival of Authors. Over the years, the festival and reading series have involved over 8,000 authors (from more than 100 countries), and the names below are certainly not the only authors appearing at this year's festival. These are
Other Friday Fugues here have focussed on Bookish Books and Epistolary Works, this year's Friday Fugue is A Fainter Footprint. As in, leaving a fainter footprint behind, ecologically speaking. To date, there has been much talk of recent cookbooks, those which are light on resources but heavy on flavour and
