Niagara-on-the-Lake is a historic jewel of a town located twenty minutes north of the waterfall. I was there exploring, this final week of August as summer started to shed leaves over fields and the weather sort of cleaned and sharpened itself into a pre-autumn chill. It was a town of farmer’s markets, tiny chapels, and…
American Pastoral by Philip Roth sucks you into a whorl of extremist Vietnam War propaganda, which comes inexplicably from the calmest part of the United States: a maple-and-oak backyard in Rimrock, New Jersey. There lives our blond-haired, blue-eyed businessman, Seymour “Swede” Levov, his beautiful wife Dawn, and their daughter Merry. Their whole suburban life is…
Summer is construction season in Canada. (Sort of like how July is vacation season in Paris—you’re not supposed to be there mid-to-late summer because everyone’s gone.) Any of the larger university campuses, McMaster University in Hamilton, and University of Toronto, become drilling grounds of green netting, tractors, yellow tape, and pylons gleaming under the sun….