Help Me, Jacques Cousteau, by Gil Adamson

In the third story from the end of Gil Adamson’s short story collection Help Me, Jacques Cousteau, Hazel, our valiant explorer and protagonist, admits that she has a terrible memory:  “I can’t remember anything in its right order, and I rarely know if it’s a memory or just something I heard somewhere.” It’s a common [...]

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We So Seldom Look on Love, by Barbara Gowdy

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a hard sell when it comes to short stories — I think I read too many overly subtle ones in high school. Call me crass, but if you’ve only got a few pages, I want something particularly interesting. Once you’ve got my attention, that’s when I’ll go looking for richer [...]

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Runaway, by Alice Munro

Well, after being scarred by my awful first year treatment of Alice, coupled with my long standing (though gradually fading) prejudice toward stories about small town ontario, I felt I owed it to Alice to return and reassess. And I must say, I enjoyed all these stories of women on the run from one thing [...]

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