Brilliant!MacLeod's writing style is so distinctive, I found myself frequently marveling at a turn of phrase or a metaphor or simile that so aptly described what he was trying to say. Having just returned from a trip to Cape Breton, I found the book especially worth reading. I only wish I had rea...
Alistair MacLeod is not prolific, just a novel and these collected short stories on his shelf. Sixteen stories spread over 31 years. Perhaps he takes every other year off or maybe he has a ‘real’ job. More likely, he anguishes over every sentence, treated like his own child, because the result...
I found this in the way that lots of us semi-literate plodders find books, from an obituary. Before his death in April, 2014, I had not previously been aware of MacLeod or his work. The praise that accompanied his obituary sent me to Amazon, and the only one of his books available (at the time)...
A delightful collection of crisp charged stories about Canadian Scots living in the beautiful, rough farming/fishing/logging/mining (heck, just about any type of work that demanded hard labor and danger) of the Cape Breton area of Nova Scotia. Well written, almost memoirish, with a fondness that ...
It was not, of course, a really dazzlingly new idea because, living on a farm, I had always been surrounded by numerous animals. Not a day went by without my touching them and the insistence of their presence affected the living of my life and the lives of the other members of my family in very r...
He still spends his summers in Inverness County, writing in a clifftop cabin looking west toward Prince Edward Island. In his early years, to finance his education he worked as a logger, a miner, and a fisherman, and writes vividly and sympathetically about such work. Until his retirement in 2000...
In the period close to Christmas, and three days after the first snowfall in this region of southwestern Ontario. The snow came quietly in the night or in the early morning. When we went to bed near midnight, there was none at all. Then early in the morning we heard the children singing Christmas...