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发帖数: 10208 | 1 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.
Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy said that Ms. Munro,
82, who has written 14 story collections, was a “master of the contemporary
short story.” She is the 13th woman to win the prize.
The selection of Ms. Munro was greeted with an outpouring of enthusiasm in
the English-speaking world, a temporary relief from recent years when the
Swedish Academy chose winners who were obscure, difficult to comprehend or
overtly political.
Ms. Munro, widely beloved for her spare and psychologically astute fiction
that is deeply revealing of human nature, appeared to be more of a purely
literary choice. She revolutionized the architecture of short stories, often
beginning a story in an unexpected place then moving backward or forward in
time. She brought a modesty and subtle wit to her work that admirers often
traced to her background growing up in rural Canada, which served as the
location for many of her stories.
Her collection “Dear Life,” published last year, appears to be her last.
She told The National Post in Canada this year that she was finished writing
, a sentiment she echoed in other interviews.
She also seemed to have finished paying attention to major literary awards,
if she ever did in the first place. On Thursday morning, the Swedish Academy
was unable to locate Ms. Munro before it made the announcement public,
according to the Twitter account for the Nobel Prize. A phone message was
left instead.
Ms. Munro, who lives in Clinton, a town in Ontario, eventually found out
that she had won while visiting her daughter in Victoria, British Columbia,
who woke her at 4 a.m. with the news. Sounding a bit groggy, and at times
emotional, she spoke with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation just a few
minutes later by telephone.
“It just seems impossible,” she said. “It seems just so splendid a thing
to happen, I can’t describe it. It’s more than I can say.”
She later added, “I would really hope this would make people see the short
story as an important art, not just something you played around with until
you got a novel.”
Waking up to the news that Ms. Munro was the winner, her admirers were
jubilant, especially in Canada.
Stephen Harper, the prime minister, issued a statement praising Ms. Munro as
the first Canadian woman to win the Nobel in literature. “Canadians are
enormously proud of this remarkable accomplishment, which is the culmination
of a lifetime of brilliant writing,” he said.
On Twitter, congratulations rolled in from publishers, literary magazines
and fellow writers including Margaret Atwood and Nathan Englander.
“A true master of the form,” Salman Rushdie wrote.
Readers used Twitter to send messages with Munro quotations. (“The constant
happiness is curiosity” was one favorite.) Some people wondered if Ms.
Munro’s honor was an indication that the short story was entering a golden
age; most Nobel winners tend to focus on novels or poems.
“I’m walking on air,” said Douglas Gibson, who began publishing Ms. Munro
’s books in 1978 after he talked her out of an attempt at a novel. “I know
that me and my immediate friends are punching the air in delight.”
Ms. Munro knew that she wanted to be a writer from the time that she was a
teenager and wrote consistently while she helped her first husband, James
Munro, run a bookstore and raise their three daughters.
She said she fell into writing short stories, the form that would make her
famous, somewhat by accident.
“For years and years, I thought that stories were just practice, till I got
time to write a novel,” she told The New Yorker in 2012. “Then I found
that they were all I could do, and so I faced that. I suppose that my trying
to get so much into stories has been a compensation.”
Her first collection, “Dance of the Happy Shades,” was published when she
was 37.
Throughout her career, she has drawn from the setting of her home of rural
Ontario and frequently expanded on themes of sex, desire, work, discontent
and aging. One of her collections, “The Love of a Good Woman,” won a
National Book Critics Circle Award in 1998. | G****a
发帖数: 10208 | 2 Canadian writer Alice Munro, "master of the contemporary short story," has
been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for her body of work. Here is a
list of books by the 82-year-old author, who recently said she was retiring
from writing:
Best-of collections:
Selected Stories (1996)
Vintage Munro (2004)
Carried Away: A Selection of Stories (2006)
Stand-alone books:
Dance of the Happy Shades (1968)
Lives of Girls and Women (1971)
Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (1974)
The Beggar Maid (1978)
The Moons of Jupiter (1982)
The Progress of Love (1986)
Friend of My Youth (1990)
Open Secrets (1994)
The Love of a Good Woman (1998)
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001)
Runaway (2004) Excerpt of USA TODAY's review: "Runaway, her 10th short-story
collection, is set in the barren, often isolated provinces of Canada and
spans several decades up through the '70s. Against this landscape, and with
a faultless ear for poignant detail, Munro presents ordinary lives that
disguise larger dramas. She delves deep into human belonging and exile." The
book "may very well be the synthesizing work of one of literature's keenest
investigators into the human soul. It will, in any case, reach far beyond
its time." — Maria Fish
The View from Castle Rock (2006) Excerpt from USA TODAY's review: "No one
writes more beautifully and with less sentiment about children, nature,
rural life and the limits placed on people's dreams, particularly women's."
— Deirdre Donahue
Too Much Happiness(2009) Excerpt from USA TODAY's review: "The title of the
collection comes from the last and longest of the stories, 'Too Much
Happiness.' It tells the story of a Russian mathematician named Sophia
Kovalevsky as she journeys through 19th-century Europe searching for her
place in the world. With this collection of surprising short stories, Munro
once again displays the fertility of her imagination and her craftsmanship
as a writer." — Deirdre Donahue
Dear Life (2012) Excerpt from USA TODAY's review: "Dear Life, Alice Munro's
exquisitely calibrated collection of stories, celebrates the essence of
existence, no matter how mundane." … "Her prose is spare, graceful and
beautifully crafted, her vision expansive. What Munro does with a story is
like alchemy. She presents toiling, troubled characters who bubble up and
engulf our imagination, leaving the reader to ponder, fascinated, the
contours of dear life." — Claudia Puig | G****a
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