in e-books, Literature |
October 10th, 2013 23 Comments
Calling her a “master of the contemporary short
story,” the Swedish Academy awarded
82-year-old Alice Munro the Nobel Prize in Literaturetoday. It is well-deserved, and hard-earned (and comes
not long after she announced her retirement from fiction). After 14 story collections, Munro has reached at
least a couple generations of writers with her psychologically subtle stories
about ordinary men and women in Huron County, Ontario, her birthplace and home.
Only the 13th woman writer to win the Nobel, Munro has previously won the Man Booker Prize in
2009, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction in Canada three times
(1968, 1978, and 1986), and two O. Henry Awards (2006 and 2008). Her regional
fiction draws as much from her Ontario surroundings as does the work of the
very best so-called “regional” writers, and captivating interactions of
character and landscape tend drive her work more so than intricate plotting.
Of that region she loves, Munro has said: “It means something to me that no other country
can—no matter how important historically that other country may be, how
‘beautiful,’ how lively and interesting. I am intoxicated by this particular
landscape… I speak the language.” The language she may have learned from the
“brick houses, the falling-down barns, the trailer parks, burdensome old
churches, Wal-Mart and Canadian Tire.” But the short story form she learned
from writers like Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Conner, and Eudora Welty. She names all three in a2001 interview with The
Atlantic,
and also mentions Chekhov and “a lot of writers that I found in The New
Yorker in the fifties who wrote about the same type of material I
did—about emotions and places.”
Munro was no young literary phenom—she did not achieve
fame in her twenties with stories in The New Yorker. A mother of
three children, she “learned to write in the slivers of time she had.” She
published her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades in
1968 at 37, an advanced age for writers today, so many of whom have several
novels under their belts by their early thirties. Munro always meant to write a
novel, many in fact, but “there was no way I could get that kind of time,” she
said:
Why do I like to write short stories? Well, I
certainly didn’t intend to. I was going to write a novel. And still! I still
come up with ideas for novels. And I even start novels. But something happens
to them. They break up. I look at what I really want to do with the material,
and it never turns out to be a novel. But when I was younger, it was simply a
matter of expediency. I had small children, I didn’t have any help. Some of
this was before the days of automatic washing machines, if you can actually
believe it. There was no way I could get that kind of time. I couldn’t look
ahead and say, this is going to take me a year, because I thought every moment
something might happen that would take all time away from me. So I wrote in bits
and pieces with a limited time expectation. Perhaps I got used to thinking of
my material in terms of things that worked that way. And then when I got a
little more time, I started writing these odder stories, which branch out a
lot.
Whether Munro’s adherence to the short form has always
been a matter of expediency, or whether it’s just what her stories need to be,
hardly matters to readers who love her work. She discusses her “stumbling” on
short fiction in the interview above from 1990 with Rex Murphy. For a detailed
sketch of Munro’s early life, see her wonderful 2011 biographical essay “Dear Life” in The New Yorker. And for those less
familiar with Munro’s exquisitely crafted narratives, we offer you below
several selections of her work free online. Get to know this author who, The
New York Times writes, “revolutionized the architecture of short
stories.” Congratulations to Ms. Munro.
Link: Opencultura http://www.openculture.com/
Link:file:///C:/Users/usuario/Downloads/Read%2018%20Short%20Stories%20From%20Nobel%20Prize-Winning%20Writer%20Alice%20Munro%20Free%20Online%20-%20Open%20Culture.htm
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
