Rereadability unbound
I’d like to think there’s something more essential about the short story than just its being, well, short. Are short stories inherently tidier, messier, more dramatic, voicier, paradoxically slower, better with beer and pretzels than neighboring forms? We could adjectival-phrase away for days on this, following up with maybe yesses and maybe nos, but I...
Amanda Lindhout: Compassion over hate
Amanda Lindhout’s remarkable memoir A House in the Sky tells the harrowing, ultimately inspirational story of her 460 days in captivity as a hostage in Somalia. Moved between derelict desert houses where she was kept in the dark, in chains, starved, and repeatedly beaten and abused by her teenage captors, she was able to call...
The wandering shop
“Where did you get that?” Billy shrugs. “Shop.” He continues to suck on a rainbow lollipop, exposing new bizarrely coloured layers with each slurp – a Russian doll of illicit sugar. Laura has somehow failed to notice that her son departed for his weekend outdoor time with a low-sugar, high-fibre apple and returned with a...
Alice Munro: ‘Menesteung’
One of the reasons to write about the past, it seems to me, is to try to save someone or something from obscurity, or as Alice Munro says in ‘Menesteung’, from her collection Friend of My Youth: “to rescue one thing from the rubbish,” to “see a trickle in time.” This is that kind of...
Tanis Rideout: Striking for the summit
Tanis Rideout’s debut novel Above All Things is a tense and seductive blend of historical fact and speculative fiction that weaves together the story of George Mallory’s ill-fated 1924 attempt to conquer Everest with that of a single day in the life of his wife Ruth as she waits at home for news of his...
