The Librarianist Patrick deWitt House of Anansi Press, July Award winner Patrick deWitt returns after 2018’s French Exit with this novel about retired librarian Bog Comet who lives a solitary life surrounded by his books. An unexpected encounter with a confused elderly woman leads to a volunteer position at a local seniors’ centre, ultimately revealing
It is helpful, as a starting point, to pay attention to the first word in the title of André Forget’s short fiction anthology “After Realism: 24 Stories for the 21st
Borderlands Alessandra Naccarato, “Our Lady of the Crisis”
In the aftermath of trauma or crisis, we are often prone to seek certainty, to search for the clearest path forward. The task of editing this issue came to me after a series of trials health struggles, the loss of a dear family member left me in a state of perplexed stasis, wondering what shape my life might take now that I’d happened upon a wellspring of resilience I’d never known was within me.
Working on this issue helped me make my way through this inertia. Finding beauty and possibility in the in-between, in uncertainty and flux, the pieces in this issue are an antidote to stagnant thought. They unsettle easy distinctions between timeworn dichotomies: life and death, self and other, art and nature, wildness and domesticity, loss and recovery. In one story, a consummate finder of lost objects discovers that “finding yourself” is not nearly as simple as finding what’s missing. In another, a newlywed’s b