Alice Munro is capable of spinning readers away from the salient detail of Austin's death in a story like "Pictures of the Ice". 1990; Penguin, 1991 Yet, she is equally capable of writing an opening which cannot be set aside and which demands rereading as the story unfolds,
"You don't know how to life your life anymore and you start drowning in it." House of Anansi, 2012 That's the thing about depression, Lynn Crosbie explains in an interview with Shelagh Rogers on CBC Radio. She describes what happens when you really start looking at the world, with
To begin, Annabel Lyon turns to books. You know you're in the hands of a writer who truly loves storytelling when that happens, right? Sure, she's making a point: "literary fiction is uniquely poised to perform an important ethical function in our lives -- namely to teach us compassion". But
The chapter titles of this work reveal that it's not some kind of textbook resource on crows: Getting Up, Preparing, Reading, Walking, Dwelling, Helping, Seeing, Coexisting, Dying and Flying. Then again, the subtitle should have been my first clue (Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness), that Crow Planet is as much
Originally published almost exactly 32 years ago, the events depicted in "Dulse" could have taken place 32 years prior and will, likely, still ring true 32 years hence. Lydia is a woman alone, not freshly alone -- for she has been divorced for nine years -- but self-consciously alone. Something
