Bronwyn Averett

  • What I’ve been reading lately

    Hello! Guess what. I quit my job to read novels full time. Just kidding! Gotcha. However, I did some time off work in order to prepare for the arrival of bébé numéro deux. As a tremendously awesome consequence, (which almost-but-not-quite makes up for the unbearable HUGENESS of my life right now), I have more time Read more

  • What I’ve been reading lately

    Let me tell you something. Between 9-5 in an office, chasing a toddler, producing literary events, and coordinating volunteers at the Blue Met festival this year, I have barely had enough time to breathe lately, let alone read. Let alone write any words about books that I’m reading. Yet. Somehow (probably in the time I Read more

  • Notes on Helen Phillips’s Some Possible Solutions

    There is a strange quiet to the stories in this collection. They wade through an environmentally devastated dystopian future and give off whispered warnings rather than roaring doom. They are uncomfortable, uneasy, but in a way that emulates the fairy tale, chock full of timeless mythic secrets, shrouded in mystery. This collection of stories follows Read more

  • Review: Life in the Court of Matane by Éric Dupont (translated by Peter McCambridge)

    Any book prefacing itself with the claim that “to understand this novel, readers must listen to ‘Little Earthquakes’ [by Tori Amos] and ‘Pointant le nord’ [by Pierre LaPointe]” is a book that already has the deck stacked significantly in its favour for me. There is probably a lot to love about a book for whom Read more

  • Ludmila Ulitskaya’s The Big Green Tent

    Usually, I cannot abide the claim that a book is “like a love letter to” another book. The expression rarely makes any real sense. And it strikes me as an unnecessarily flowery way to say that one book is like another, or influenced by another, or otherwise responding to another book in some way. But in this case, Read more

  • Notes on Jill Alexander Essbaum’s Hausfrau

    It’s important to notice that, while she may be fiction, we do live in a world that is partially responsible for the creation of a tragic figure like Anna Benz. Read more