Julia is lying on the hotel bathroom floor with a nosebleed, a few hours before her literary reading, from her book of poetry, at an event in northern Ontario. She jokes that she’s a “promising” poet, which means that her fee is lower than that paid to poets who
Maybe three years ago, I watched an interview with Margaret Atwood—back when all the talk was about The Testaments (either its coming or its arriving), in which she was asked whether she considers herself an optimist or a pessimist and on the following weekend, Mr BIP and I were
This is the final story in the single volume of Alistair MacLeod's collected stories, Island (if you're discovering this project after it's complete, you will be able to find the schedule for this reading project here). After spending a little more than a year with Alistair MacLeod’s short stories,
Another voice-driven young woman’s story—Fatima Daas’s The Last One (2021)—held me rapt throughout. At first, I wondered if the repetitive variations on “My name is Fatima” that open each segment of the story would grate on me but, perhaps because the prose is arranged so that it’s almost-verse-like, it
Yesterday, in the wake of the librarians’ shushing, some might have taken advantage of the ensuing silence for a nap. Now, yawning ourselves awake, we can resume our chat about the overlap between fiction and non-fiction, in sprawling and slightly chaotic stacks and shelves. In the opening story of
