“When I was on the Squarehead square rigger, bound for Buenos Aires. Full moon in the trades. The old hooker driving 14 knots. I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume under me. Every mast with sail white in the moonlight––towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty […]
A whole class of first-years could have graduated from Hogwarts since 2007, when J.K. Rowling shocked the world by concluding the Harry Potter series with a book that delighted the vast majority of her rabid fans. It’s still a wonder she pulled it off, given the pressure she must have felt to avoid being tarred […]
Family Furnishings is my second foray into the mind of Alice Munro, but will certainly not be my last. Munro writes the best prose––and the best short stories––of any modern author with whom I am familiar. Her disarmingly prosaic and delectably mysterious tales unveil the hidden meanings lurking within the mundane corners of everyday existence. After […]
“Jumping off the train was supposed to be a cancellation. You roused your body, readied your knees, to enter a different block of air. You looked forward to emptiness. And instead, what did you get? An immediate flock of new surroundings, asking for your attention in a way they never did when you were sitting […]
“The time was coming very soon when all this would be over, the routines would be broken up, and we would be fetched by our parents to resume our old lives, and the counsellors would go back to being ordinary people, not even teachers. We were living in a stage set about to be dismantled, […]
“The dark and the snow are too thick for him to see beyond the first trees. He’s been in there before at this time, when the dark shuts down in early winter. But now he pays attention, he notices something about the bush that he thinks he has missed those other times. How tangled up […]
“One night somebody asked, when is the best time in a man’s life? Some said, it’s when you are a kid and can fool around all the time and go down to the river in the summer and play hockey on the road in the winter and that’s all you think about, fooling around and […]
I am in my late twenties, engaged to be married, and the occupant of a household that is, in many ways, an ideal environment in which to raise children. Despite these fortunate circumstances, I am deeply ambivalent about becoming a parent. So, after my fiance read Meghan Daum’s Selfish, Shallow, and Self Absorbed: Sixteen Writers […]
“It’s what happen at home that you try to protect, as best you can, for as long as you can.” ––Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014, by Alice Munro, pg. 303 “We childless ones, whether through bravery or cowardice, constitute a kind of existential vanguard, forced by our own choices to face the naked question […]
“The bargain she was bound to was to go on living as she had been doing. The bargain was already in force. To accept what had happened and be clear about what would happen. Days and years and feelings much the same, except that the children would grow up, and there might be one or […]