Loom, the solitary and reclusive neighbor, is a delicious enigma who has captured the imagination of the Zaydan women, as he either slaves away in his garden or endlessly toils at constructing an igloo in the icy snow. He never lets up and is always looming just on the periphery of their home and, indeed, their minds.
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Most of us know the disorientation of travel to a country with a different language and customs. The simplest daily activities can become so difficult—where will we eat? How do we look for the bathroom? Reading Renee Gladman's intriguing novella Event Factory redoubles that feeling, in the story of a traveler whose experiences and behavior have an unusual orientation to everyday logic.
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This captivating and enlightening memoir of a Muslim girl growing up in 1970s and 1980s Britain begins in the future, as the author has been captured and taken to the Torture Room of the police headquarters in the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka. Malik was employed by Channel 4 in Britain, and visited Bangladesh to film a story about …
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One of the things I look for in a novel is a sense of place, the ability of an author to transport me across the world and set me down in a setting very different from my own. I do not just want descriptions of what a town or city looks like; I want to understand the place—its customs, its people, its smells and tastes. Reading should be a form of travel …
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Put the words Vietnam War and Canada in a sentence together and, for Americans of a certain age—particularly men—you conjure specific memories of the early 1970s. I remember those days as quite carefree: wondering about my chances of a date and thankful I could pass for 18 in the local bar. Yet, is my memory reliable?
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