A list of 13 authors from 8 different countries who were nominated for the Man Booker International Prize — which is awarded “to a living author for a body of work that has contributed to an achievement in fiction on the world stage” — was released yesterday. The winner will receive an award of £60,000 (approximately $85,000) as well as the ability to refer to him or herself in the third person as a “notable” author. Next month, the MBIP panel will winnow it down to a single winner, who will be announced at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, with an awards ceremony taking place on June 28th in London. Since the prize is awarded every two years, the last prize winner was the unflappable short story writer Alice Munro in 2009.
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We recently heard that Joan Didion has written a memoir about the experience of aging, a subject that, though unavoidable for most of us, is often relegated to the better-left-ignored category of conversation. Though the aches and pains of aging may feel too far away for some of us, or simply too morbid to broach head-on, here are five works of fiction that elegantly capture the ups and downs of a life relived in retrospect.
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The goal of each installment of the Fiction Fix is to present you with a bite-sized capsule of fiction. Operating under the assumption that novels require the kind of time commitment you may not have, we scour literary magazines and new story collections to recommend one (just one!) short story that is most certainly worth your time.
Jean Thompson, who gets called “America’s Alice Munro” so often that she might as well print up business cards, has a new short story collection, Do Not Deny Me: Stories, out this week. The second story in the collection, “Wilderness,” was featured last year in One Story, a literary magazine after Fiction Fix’s own heart — the brainchild of Hannah Tinti, they send subscribers one complete, excellent, free-standing short story every three weeks. Read More »
Attention please: The New York Times’ Arts Beat reports Alice Munro has won one of literature’s most heavy-hitting awards, the International Man Booker Prize. Munro is one Canada’s most celebrated writers, and she’s also a writer’s writer, inspiring the kind of gushing usually exhibited only by Jonas Brothers fans. Jane Smiley says: “Any writer has to gawk when reading her because her work is very subtle and precise. Her thoughtfulness about every subject is so concentrated.” Cynthia Ozick has called Munro “our Chekhov.” Curtis Sittenfeld has also been known to cite Munro from time to time. Read More »
