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
Read more…

Buy books by all the authors mentioned in this post here...

Lynn Coady has won the 2013 Scotiabank Giller Prize

"Edmonton author Lynn Coady won the $50,000 Scotiabank Giller Prize for the year’s best book of Canadian fiction, besting a varied shortlist made up of familiar names, a past nominee, and an exciting newcomer. Her winning short story collection, Hellgoing, is the follow up to her novel The Antagonist, which was a Giller finalist in 2011. […]
     Ms. Coady, the author of five previous books, is one of the most respected younger writers in Canada, and the Giller Prize win will serve only to further establish her reputation.
     In his Globe review of Hellgoing, critic Jeet Heer praised Ms. Coady’s stories, and located within them a connection to a particular spiritual background: 'One of the hallmarks of Lynn Coady’s work is her shrewd examination of the underexplored byways of human psychology, including the twisty road that connects a religious upbringing with outré erotic experimentation.'”
— Jared Bland, The Globe and Mail
Read more…