Thursday, December 31, 2009

Six great female short story authors

Sarah Crown is the editor of guardian.co.uk/books. One of the six female short story writers she recently profiled:
Alice Munro

Set in the fields, farms and modest towns of her native Canada and thrumming with the rhythms and rotations of daily life, Munro's stories tend to focus, as the title of her second collection has it, on the lives of girls and women, digging down to uncover the passions and excesses that rumble beneath the surface of everyday life. While the stories themselves frequently unspool over pages, pressing up against the limits of the form, her prose is distinguished by its plain- spokenness and descriptive economy. A famously unassuming woman, her reputation has grown incrementally over the four decades since her first collection was published; fellow author, Cynthia Ozick, called her "our Chekhov", and her Man Booker International victory was widely viewed as a long-overdue coronation.

Three to read: A Wilderness Station (from Open Secrets), The Bear Came Over The Mountain (from Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage), Passion (from Runaway).
Read about another writer in Crown's feature.

--Marshal Zeringue