Imagine a fictional town called Starkfield, Massachusetts, a bleak wintry landscape with horse-pulled carriage carrying a gaunt man called Ethan Frome. That’s a pretty good description of Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton’s most famous novella. This post, of course, is about Summer, her other novella, which she describes as the “hot Ethan”—a wild way to put…
I’ve never before written a review on a book that I read in another language, so this is a first. The White Book by Han Kang, Nobel Prize-winning author, is 흰 (simply “white”) in Korean, the language it was written. It is a series of vignettes and meditations on objects that are white, each one…
Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood is a novel about paintings—and even resembles one in its stillness. It’s also about the young girl who’ll create those paintings, currently growing up in late-1980s Toronto, nine years old and badly startled by the contrast between city life and her previous life in the northern Ontario woods with her…