microcosmic

Hot on the heels of Alice Munro's Nobel Prize for Literature comes the news that Lynn Coady has won the Giller for her collection of short stories, Hellgoing.

     Could this be a sign that the short story has once again claimed its rightful place in the firmament of literary respectability?
     Collections of short stories are notorious hard to get published, but maybe a new generation's love affair with e-books and all things digital will kindle a revival of interest in this often overlooked art form.
     Here's an article by Thom Grier of Entertainment Weekly about book trailers that might bode well for the future of the short story.

"Cheever and Updike were my literary parents; the vistas they described—the 1960s and 1970s, the shaken cocktails, the urgent bad sex, the smoky, Nixonian America—amplified my own narrow vision. Casting further back, Hemingway and Fitzgerald represented (impossible to imagine this now) literary polar opposites—bullfights and Africa! Martinis and money!
     Drawn to decadence in every form, I also wanted to read writing that might erase boundaries of generation, gender, race and class, and show how one might live more fully in the great body of humanity. I discovered American champions of working class experience--Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, Raymond Carver--then Tolstoy, Chekhov, Babel, Kafka, and Borges. I’m still regularly blown open by the wildly different effects writers achieve using the somewhat limited range of 
human experience, language and consciousness.
      The following 10 collections—whole atmospheres made entirely of words—feel essential, either because they manage to make human experience feel new, or because, like some uncle who left a $1,000,000 legacy, their influence lingers. [...]"
— Carolyn Cooke, Publishers Weekly
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Buy books by all the authors mentioned in this post here...

Alice Munro wins the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature

From: Hindustan Times

"Alice Munro wins the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first Canadian woman to take the award since its launch in 1901.

     Munro, 82, only the 13th woman given the award, was lauded by the Swedish Academy during the Nobel announcement in Stockholm as the 'master of the contemporary short story.'
     'We're not saying just that she can say a lot in just 20 pages — more than an average novel writer can — but also that she can cover ground. She can have a single short story that covers decades, and it works,' said Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy.
     Reached in British Columbia by CBC News on Thursday morning, Munro said she always viewed her chances of winning the Nobel as 'one of those pipe dreams' that 'might happen, but it probably wouldn't.' Alice Munro Munro's daughter woke her up to tell her the news. 'It's the middle of the night here and I had forgotten about it all, of course,' she told the CBC's Heather Hiscox early Thursday.
     Munro called the honour 'a splendid thing to happen.'
     Munro said her husband, Gerald Fremlin, a geographer/cartographer who died in April, would have been very happy, and that her previous husband, James Munro, with whom she has three children, and all her family were thrilled."
— CBC

"Alice Munro near her home in Clinton, Ontario."
from: The New York Times

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"Alice Munro, the renowned Canadian short-story writer whose visceral work explores the tangled relationships between men and women, small-town existence and the fallibility of memory, won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. Ms. Munro, 82, is the 13th woman to win the prize.
     Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy said that Ms. Munro was a 'master of the contemporary short story.'
     Ms. Munro, who lives in Clinton, a town in Ontario, told a writer from The Globe and Mail this year that she planned to retire after Dear Life, her 14th story collection.
     In a statement from Penguin Random House, her publisher, Ms. Munro said that she was 'amazed, and very grateful' for the prize."
— Julie Bosman, The New York Times
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See related posts here, here, and here...

Watch an Alice Munro interview here…

alone at the top

'Sad news, for fans of Alice Munro, the short-story author whom Margaret Atwood once described as en route to 'international literary sainthood,' and whose writing Jane Smiley, awarding her the Man Booker international prize, said was 'practically perfect.' She has told Canadian press that she's retiring – and this time she sounds definite.
     Winning the Trillium book award for Dear Life, Munro told the National Post that the prize was 'a little more special in that I'm probably not going to write any more. And, so, it's nice to go out with a bang,' adding that this was definitely it for her, and she has 'very much' come to terms with the decision.
     'I'm delighted. Not that I didn't love writing, but I think you do get to a stage where you sort of think about your life in a different way. And perhaps, when you're my age, you don't wish to be alone as much as a writer has to be. It's like, at the wrong end of life, sort of becoming very sociable,' she said."
— Alison Flood, The Guardian
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Buy all of Alice Munro's books here...

"… miniatures? Anecdotes? Essays? Jokes? Parables? Fables? Texts? Aphorisms, or even apophthegms?" — Man Booker Judge, Christopher Ricks

Lydia Davis (Photo: Luke MacGregor, Reuters [via The Star])

(For a definition of "apophthegm" go here...)

"The impossible-to-categorise Lydia Davis, known for the shortest of short stories, has won the Man Booker International prize ahead of fellow American Marilynne Robinson and eight other contenders from around the world.
     The £60,000 award is for a body of work, and is intended to celebrate 'achievement in fiction on the world stage.' Cited as 'innovative and influential,' Davis becomes the biennial prize's third successive winner from North America, after fellow American Philip Roth won in 2011 – prompting a controversial walk-out from the judge Carmen Callil, partly over her disappointment in the panel's failure to choose a writer in translation – and Canadian short story writer Alice Munro took the prize in 2009.
     Best known for her short stories, most of which are less than three pages long, and some of which run to just a paragraph or a sentence, Davis has been described as 'the master of a literary form largely of her own invention.' Idea for a Short Documentary Film runs as follows: ;Representatives of different food product manufacturers try to open their own packaging.' In A Double Negative, she writes merely that: 'At a certain point in her life, she realises it is not so much that she wants to have a child as that she does not want not to have a child, or not to have had a child.'

— Alison Flood, The Guardian
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"Davis said it was Proust’s monumental work and famously long sentences that helped inspire her succinct writing style.
     'Actually, when I was translating Proust was when I thought, "how short could a short story be?'’' she told Reuters after receiving the 60,000 pound ($90,800) award in London. 'I thought "how little could you say and still have it work?"'"
— Reuters (via The Star)
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Buy Lydia Davis' book here...

Un-American Activities

"On Monday afternoon, the Pulitzer Prize Board will announce the winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Or not.
     Last year, for the first time in 35 years, there was no prize awarded for fiction. Imagine Bono walking on stage to award the Grammy for Album of the Year and announcing that there wouldn't be an award for Album of the Year. It was like that. The snub earned the Pulitzer Prizes more publicity — and not the good kind — than the actual awards, and I can't imagine them laying an egg again this year. […]

     First, let's knock out three of the most praised books of the year on technicalities. The Pulitzer for fiction is limited to American authors (how rude!), so Alice Munro's much-loved short story collection Dear Life (Knopf) is out because Munro is — wait for it — Canadian.
     Also out: UK's Hilary Mantel, who wrote the Booker Prize-winning Anne Boleyn novel, Bring Up the Bodies (Henry Holt), and Zadie Smith, who wrote the London-set NBCC finalist NW (Penguin)."
— Scott Porch, Huffington Post
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Buy the books by Hilary Mantel, Alice Munro and Zadie Smith; and the works of all the Pulitzer prize contenders here...

" A story begins as a blind groping in the dark [...]"

"I don't think Alice Munro would care to be called my hero, or anyone's. And yet she is the writer whose female characters I feel the most kinship with. Whether she is a feminist writer or not, Munro has said: 'I never think about being a feminist writer, but of course I wouldn't know. I don't see things all put together that way.'"
— Nell Freudenberger, The Guardian

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"In his 2004 New York Times review of Alice Munro’s Runaway, author Jonathan Franzen painted himself into a corner by bluntly stating what has likely occurred to most reviewers of Munro’s work: 'Runaway is so good that I don’t want to talk about it here. Quotation can’t do the book justice, and neither can synopsis. The way to do it justice is to read it.'"
— Quill & Quire
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Buy all of Alice Munro's books here... just an hour's drive from Lake Huron and the region of Ontario where most of her stories are set.

Alice Munro... "disjointed and demanding and peculiar."

Alice Munro in conversation with The Atlantic:

"In your introduction to one of your earlier collections, Selected Stories, you say your stories have, over the years, 'grown longer, and in a way more disjointed and demanding and peculiar.' Why do you think they've evolved this way?"

'You know, I'm not sure why this has happened, because when I'm writing a story, I don't really analyze it. But once I've got the story finished and I begin doing things with it, I think that in many ways what I've written breaks all the rules of the short story. This occurs to me, but not with any particular regret; I figure I can only write what interests me. So I don't try to do anything to make it a more regular story. In fact, if a story wants to go in a particular direction, I let that happen. I just put it out there and see what it does."

"You said your stories tend to break the rules. How so?"

"Well, I have an idea. Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn't a rule about this. But there's a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward. I feel that this is something that people may find they have to adjust to, but it's a way of saying whatever it is that I want to say, and it sort of has to be done this way. Time is something that interests me a whole lot—past and present, and how the past appears as people change."
— The Atlantic
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Buy all of Alice Munro's books here...

"Layers of Tissue"

"Alice Munro is so routinely called one of the greatest living short story writers that the accolade risks dulling the brilliance of her work, and certainly obscures its strangeness. While the typical setting of her stories is her native small-town southwestern Ontario – although numerous exceptions can be found among her 12 collections and one sort-of-novel – their content is anything but prosaic. Munro slices through domestic surfaces into the emotional and psychological turmoil beneath. As one of her narrators says of her hometown, 'People's lives in Jubilee, as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, unfathomable, deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.'

     Munro is, in Coral Ann Howells's description, an artist of indeterminacy, a trait on which she pins her inability to write novels. She explained to the Paris Review in 1994 that, 'I have all these disconnected realities in my own life, and I see them in other people's lives. That was one of the problems – why I couldn't write novels, I never saw things hanging together any too well.' She actively resists definite conclusions in her fiction, telling Brick in 1991 that 'I want the story to exist somewhere so that in a way it's still happening, or happening over and over again. I don't want it to be shut up in the book and put away – oh well, that's what happened.' "— Chris Power, Guardian
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Buy Alice Munro books here...