I pulled André Alexis' Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa (1994) off my shelf when Fifteen Dogs was nominated for the Toronto Book Award (since then, FD has also been nominated for the Giller Prize and the Rogers' Writers' Trust Fiction Award). There aren't any notable four-legged characters, but the collection is fascinating.
In the past, I've made large stacks of creepy reading with the RIP challenges in mind, but I have a habit of stacking up many lovely possibilities but then choosing different books altogether later on. Perhaps this is partly because books can surprise you and take you in unexpected directions.
For the past couple of weeks, I have been listening to Joseph Boyden's Through Black Spruce on my daily walks. I was walking in full summer, listening to descriptions of winter in Moose Factory in Northern Ontario. The clusters of cloud in the story were from the exhaust of snowmobiles in
Ins Choi's play, Kim's Convenience is already on my list of favourite reads for this year. House of Anansi, 2015 I know, I know, it's only August, but I am certain already (because it literally made me laugh out loud several times and then it made me cry). It
On the list of 10 Perfect Alice Munro sentences, recently selected by CBC, this is the first: "Every year, when you’re a child, you become a different person." It begs the question, "When does one stop becoming somebody new every year?" Perhaps after an event like the incident described in this
