Stories
Who do you want to be after a house purge? (Recycling is the easy part)
Our house is over-stuffed with stuff. We haven’t moved in years and things have accumulated largely unmolested in corners and crannies. I sometimes think they’ve been breeding at the back of closets, even though I’ve done several purges over the past few years. But I’ve only ever got as far as the easy stuff: duplicates, […]
Book Review: The Trembling Hand, by Mathelinda Nabugodi
A lawyer friend of the family says he knows of three Canadians who’ve been asked at the U.S. border by immigration officers whether they support Donald Trump. I’ve searched my memory, but can’t think of anyone who was queried about any other U.S. president. When I mentioned this to an American friend, she emailed back, “I’ve […]
Book Review: The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum by Margalit Fox
It’s a classic American success story. Fredericka Mandelbaum arrived in the U.S. as a penniless immigrant and built a cutting-edge, multi-million dollar business from scratch. The twist? “Ma” Mandelbaum ran a criminal empire, which she launched by gathering freelance thieves into a profitable network. To launder the take, Mrs. Mandelbaum (as one must call her) […]
Book Review: February House by Sherill Tippins (and W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers and Gypsy Rose Lee)
It’s 1940. The United States hasn’t yet entered the Second World War, but artists and writers have been fleeing Europe ahead of Hitler, many to New York, some to a shabby house in Brooklyn leased by a magazine editor who knows everybody. There, at 7 Middagh Street, you might find English poet W.H. Auden keeping […]
Book Review: Custodians of Wonder by Eliot Stein
The last nightwatchman in Scandinavia climbs 14 flights of stairs every night to his nook above the belfry of a 13th century church in the Swedish town of Ystad. Roland Borg is in his mid-seventies, and for almost 60 years he has kept watch on Ystad, scanning its ancient streets for fires, its stores for […]
The Infinite Pile of New Yorkers
On my first birthday after my husband and I got married, my mother-in-law gave me a subscription to The New Yorker. It was a thoughtful present to give a bookish new daughter-in-law, someone determined to be a writer, even though I’d only published two or three short stories in literary magazines. Maybe Mary thought that giving […]
Book Review: One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
Writer Taffy Brodsesser-Akner has a question. A friend asks if she’ll interview her father, a Holocaust survivor who’s been given a terminal cancer diagnosis. The friend has asked before, and Brodesser-Akner has repeatedly refused. After being battered by stories of genocide at her Jewish high school, she’s decided she’s going to push her preoccupation with […]
The Holocaust, and how one writer faces it
Two writers whose work I admire. Two pieces about genocide: a book written by a man with a complicated Middle Eastern-immigrant background, and an article by a Jewish woman born in the U.S. Both centre on the author’s own people and the great evils perpetrated against them. Both are written in great upset and outrage, […]
Book Review(s): Tanya Talaga’s The Knowing and Omar El Akkad
One of the first words I learned when I moved to Mexico was gente. The English translation is “people,” and you often hear Mexicans talking about mi gente. For those who don’t speak Spanish, it’s pronounced “me hen-tay” and it means “my people.” I usually heard it as a fond word, an embrace, although it could sometimes be […]
How to keep a notebook. Or how I do.
“It’s okay,” a guy tells his dog. “It’s all right, buddy.” “Is everyone feeling weird today?” another man asks him. “It’s the atmosphere,” the dog guy says. “What does that mean?” “We’re victims of the chem trails in the sky.” That’s something I wrote in one of the notebooks I always carry. Sometimes I use […]
Film Review: The Return of the G’psgolox Pole
The documentary opens with a pan up a totem pole in a Swedish museum, far away from where it was carved in the 19th century on the northwest coast of Canada. The historic pole is shackled by a collar and suspended—imprisoned—in wires. The symbolism reverberates through the film, which I stumbled on while I was searching […]
Old friends and new connections: a small memoir
I had a friend in high school, a guy I never saw afterward, although I always thought fondly and vaguely that we might eventually meet again. Then one day I got a high school update saying that Derek had suffered a stroke. He had lived with the after-effects for several years but had died not […]
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