![]() ![]() As a type of social failure.” The title alone - All My Puny Sorrows - gives a taste of the self-aware comedy to come but it is taken from a beautiful, earnest Coleridge poem: “I had moved away,” says the narrator of AMPS, “…and had two kids with two different guys…as a type of social experiment. Yet even as they grapple with the heaviest themes, Toews’ books are also some of the most genuinely funny that I have encountered - not forced or satirical, just good, original humor - because, in her own words, “that is what life is like - brutal, comic, everything happening at the wrong moment.” Her characters are quirky, idiosyncratic, a mother constantly reading whodunits, a mail carrier with a rebellious spirit. ![]() Her newest book, Women Talking, is a response to the real-life story of mass sexual assault in a remote Mennonite colony its cover art (see below) is both elegant and ominous, evoking, at least from our current cultural imagination, The Handmaid’s Tale. Miriam Toews (pronounced “taves”) first came to my attention in 2015 with All My Puny Sorrows, a moving novelization of her sister’s suicide this intelligent, propulsive work tested the bounds of empathy and family loyalty. ![]()
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