Fiction-writing often seems to be a ventriloquist’s game, the writingwriter throwing a voice into a narrator with varying degrees of credibility. Perhaps as with ventiloquism, we are swayed to find the act more convincing if…
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I had hoped to write about Miriam Toews’ The Flying Troutmans, but one of my daughters (who counts Toews’ A Complicated Kindness among her favourites) has borrowed it. Without pages to turn, passages to look…
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Today’s Globe and Mail includes an adapted excerpt from David Adams Richards’ new book, God Is, an excerpt that I think is important, controversial, and well worth reading. The headline for the essay suggests its…
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I’ve almost forgotten to mention that I recently read Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Luis Zafon after reading several enthusiastic references. I ordered it thinking it would be the perfect summer escape reading —…
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I’m reading Sandra Gilbert’s Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve and it’s helping me articulate something of what I experienced intensely through/at Pater’s vasovagal episodes (fainting) last week. She uses Georges Batailles…
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