Tag: books
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The Helplessness of Grief and the Trauma of Academia: Maria Adelmann’s The Adjunct
As I was reading Adelmann’s campus novel, I was thinking about one of the most brilliant and personable labour organizers I’ve ever met, the late Miranda Merklein. I miss her. Like this novel’s protagonist, Merklein had realistic expectations of a middle-class life as a college teacher: not a cossetted existence, but decent health insurance and…
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Vancouver Crime Fiction’s Sense of Place and a May 21 Event
Several years ago, as I was starting a Creative Writing program at U of T, I took a crime fiction course with Vancouver writer Sam Wiebe; I’d taken a previous course on mystery writing with Gail Bowen. The two courses were completely different in delivery mode and approach, but both were terrific–and transformative. They made…
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Val McDermid’s Silent Bones (Karen Pirie #8)
Scottish crime writer Val McDermid is prolific as well as extraordinarily accomplished: she writes some of the best crime fiction currently in print, and she continues to challenge herself with more complex plots and characterizations. Karen Pirie, the Historical Cases investigator who is the protagonist of this series, is a good example. McDermid has portrayed…
