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….
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…