And the Nobel prize for literature 2013...

[Bookpossum]

I have read some of her work, down here in darkest Oz. A wonderful writer and well deserving of the Nobel Prize.

[kennyc]

[kennyc]

And: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/11/bo...omen.html?_r=0

AN APPRAISAL
Master of the Intricacies of the Human Heart
Alice Munro, Nobel Winner, Mines the Inner Lives of Girls and Women

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: October 10, 2013

Alice Munro, named on Thursday as the winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, once observed: “The complexity of things — the things within things — just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.”

That is also a perfect description of Ms. Munro’s quietly radiant short stories — stories that have established her as one of the foremost practitioners of the form. Set largely in small-town and rural Canada and often focused on the lives of girls and women,
....

And I think that's exactly why I can't seem to get into the...

[taming]

So, I was in line at the grocery store and two women were talking about Alice Munro. Two older women. Two women who probably don't read all that much. One of them called her "our Alice Munro". This win is a very big deal here in my western prairie city.

From the Toronto Star:

Alice Munro: She’s ours and she’s great
By: Heather Mallick

...Here is what Munro does. She studies her fellow humans with an almost indescribable intensity. Brain science is so exciting and excitable now—look, that bit lights up when you have your morning coffee!—but Munro has been doing this in prose for a lifetime.

All people are deeply strange. They have secrets and when you peel them, those secrets come out. I am convinced of this but will never make my case. I don’t need to because Munro has done it already...

[Prestidigitweeze]

One of the great things about Alice Munro's win is that it brings attention back to the short story in an age when readers, agents, publishers and critics seem interested in the novel above all else. A miniaturist's commitment to writing well can be at least as profound as a novelist's.

And of course, the award draws attention to other exceptional Canadian writers who have yet to be discovered by the rest of the world's reading public.

Having lived in Canada briefly and in the Northwest during my formative years, I'm partial to what I call an overcast sensibility -- a slightly dark tone or aesthetic which seems to go with cloudy weather -- in many of the writers I admire. Alice Munro has that, but so do a lot of other Canadian novelists (from Margaret Atwood to Nicole Lundrigan).

Stylistically, Munro occupies a place which I very much respect. She's perfected a kind of stripped-down prose and structure that reject the inessential, which is why her work can be classically spare without becoming minimalist (a school which can lead to banal forms of excess at least as often as the kinds of writing which minimalists reject). She's concise without being mannered or representative of some once-trendy school of writing imposed by publishers and MFA programs. She's a writer who became herself before anyone else could define her.

[doubleshuffle]

A woman! If they had to choose a Canadian, why couldn't they at least pick a serious heterosexual male like, erm, David Gilmour...

[montsnmags]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

One of the great things about Alice Munro's win is that it brings attention back to the short story in an age when readers, agents, publishers and critics seem interested in the novel above all else. A miniaturist's commitment to writing well can be at least as profound as a novelist's.

[...]

I have never read anything by Alice Munro, but your comments reminded me of a recent book of short fiction by Josephine Rowe called How A Moth Becomes A Boat. Some of these stories are near a single page long without feeling "stripped", and I recall them with an admittedly unreliable memory as being very beautiful, sombre, sometimes painful (is "painful" the right word? It seems right, but I mean it in a good way). And it was their brevity that made them beautiful - a full experience in so few pages.

Why I didn't bounce from that into more short stories, I don't know. But Alice Munro's award and what has been said here may be the prompting I need.

Cheers, and thanks,
Marc

[Istvan diVega]

I have to confess that I too have never heard of her. I'm sure the prize is well deserved, but considering that I rarely read short stories these days and that hers are "set largely in small-town and rural Canada and often focused on the lives of girls and women" I'm unlikely to get to know her much better.

Nevertheless, congrats and the best of wishes to you, Mrs. Munro!

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

One of the great things about Alice Munro's win is that it brings attention back to the short story in an age when readers, agents, publishers and critics seem interested in the novel above all else. A miniaturist's commitment to writing well can be at least as profound as a novelist's.
......

Yes! I'm very much glad to see this! The short story is my favorite form of fiction.

[llcj]

Originally Posted by doubleshuffle

A woman! If they had to choose a Canadian, why couldn't they at least pick a serious heterosexual male like, erm, David Gilmour...

[kennyc]

One of her stories from her latest collection "Dear Life" is in the Telegraph:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/b...ive-story.html

[Dr. Drib]

CORRECTION AND ADDITIONAL INFO concerning my earlier post:


I've just discovered (in re-reading "Away From Her"), that this story was originally titled "The Bear Came Over The Mountain,"and is in the collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories.

As mentioned previously, the story was made into a film, and is titled "Away From Her."



Don

[ProfCrash]

Dr. Drib, I picked up Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Lovership, Marriage: Stories before you even posted that it was a great collection because the title intrigued me.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Yes! I'm very much glad to see this! The short story is my favorite form of fiction.

If you're having trouble with Alice Munro, I wonder if you might prefer another great Canadian short story writer: Mavis Gallant, whom many would say is Alice Munro's equal, but whose style and sensibility are very different. Mavis writes like a classic émigré. I love the fact she's a French Canadian who speaks her mother tongue when she's out and about in Paris (or perhaps revisiting Montreal), only to go home to write exclusively in English.

Besides which, her eye for detail is flawless.

Read a bit of this interview and you'll be able to tell instantly how different she is from Munro:

http://www.theparisreview.org/interv...-mavis-gallant

Kobo has her Paris Stories at a discount, and we all know about that 50% coupon, so check out a preview and see whether you like her before that coupon expires.

If only The Collected Stories were available as an e-book!

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by ProfCrash

Dr. Drib, I picked up Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Lovership, Marriage: Stories before you even posted that it was a great collection because the title intrigued me.

I hope you enjoy it. I read this collection back when it first came out, and had forgotten the ordering of the stories.

I'm also anxious to see the film that was made from one of those included stories.



Don