Irina Dumitrescu

At one point in Susannah M. Smith’s The Alchemy of Paradise, the narrator follows her father’s ghostly footsteps to Venice, the city where he drowned several years earlier. She sits at a writing desk in an apartment overlooking a canal, gazing at the “ribbons of light” on the water. Her reverie transports her to the last breath he…

Five million people sleep “in stacks / of glass and steel” at the beginning of Daniel Cowper’s Kingdom of the Clock. It is six in the morning, and most of the city has not yet awakened to do its business of loving, chasing, and haggling. The novel in verse presents a day in its citizens’ lives parcelled out into twenty-four…

Here is a news item you are unlikely to read anytime soon: “A recent survey reports that Canadians have increasing faith in their institutions. Trust in business and political leaders is at an all-time high. Confidence in the spread of solid, reliable information is on the rise.” Those things could, in fact, happen. But trust is a story only when it is slipping…