Mark Anthony Jarman

The Glass Harmonica is set in Newfoundland, but it is not necessarily a Newfoundland book. Russell Wangersky focuses on one street in St. John’s, rather than taking on the whole East Coast cosmology. A narrow focus, but The Glass Harmonica is a wonderful work, a large work, lyrical at times (children “can feel the currents in a room the way eagles find…

Gore Vidal once described Moby Dick as “a very bad masterpiece,” and most readers will understand exactly what he meant. Notwithstanding the book’s mythic grandeur, that huge chapter on “the whiteness of the whale,” for instance, has to be one of the most indigestible bits of fiction ever written. It was in the same spirit as Vidal’s observation that the LRC editorial staff planned this December’s holiday…