I started the year off with a review of Mavis Gallant’s stories, and now for the next Canadian literary siren, Alice Munro. Famous of course for winning the Nobel Prize and for a few of her stories/linked stories becoming films, Alice Munro is known for writing exclusively short stories, though she herself admits in the introduction to this collection that she had wanted to write novels but they never came and that as she got older her stories became long and longer. The longest story […]
The Nobel Committee Made a Good Choice
All you Cannonballers know that Alice Munro recently won the Nobel Prize for literature. I hadn’t read any Munro yet (!) so what better time than a Cannonball? I’m not sure what I can say that hasn’t already been said about Munro’s talent. It’s very hard to summarize this collection of stories and, indeed, Munro’s overall style. She tells stories that don’t really have a beginning, middle, end; there’s no climax. But they are remarkably real, and that’s what keeps you reading. They are stories […]