A Brief Author Recommendation

I’ve been remiss in failing to note this. Last month, Alice Munro, who is primarily known for her short fiction, was awarded the Man Booker International Prize*. I don’t have time to write something detailed about her work right now, but let me at least say that her characters are portrayed with enough telling detail, narrative scope, and sense of place to become intensely real. Her work is therefore naturally poignant, but so unpretentious and thoughtful that it lacks the sentimentality to which, given that it has its share of sadness, it might easily have fallen prey. (I think of sentimentality, roughly, as a stifling didacticism—in particular, sympathy or other emotion achieved by using characters and situations that evoke facile identification or rejection, rather than, say, by creating well-developed personalities and highly individualized mileus.)

At any rate, if you haven’t read Munro, you should pick up one of her short story collections. This is a cliché about short stories, but it fits so well in this instance that it demands to be said: each story is a world unto itself, and correspondingly rich. (With some hesitation, I also suggest that you not start with “The View from Castle Rock,” which, given its historical settings, seems to me a bit less approachable than some of her other work.)



*Note: This honor, awarded every two years, should not be confused with the annual Man Booker Prize (“Booker Prize”), which is given to a Commonwealth novel.