By way of a punctuation mark in my explorations of a few collections:
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
I can't think of another word than 'genius'. Davis has hit upon and refined a style so much her own and so elegantly muscular. I can't read too much of her at any one time, but I can't imagine tiring of her either.
Clarice Lispector - Complete Stories
I've really only dipped into these and they are fabulously strange. Deep waters.
Alice Munro - Runaway
I've read the title story - which is pretty much perfect - and the three after it, which are all about Juliet: "Chance", "Soon" and "Silence". I admire these more than love them; they're deep and fine; they shed light on life.
(a gift from Sarah M & Ben)
Alistair MacLeod - Island
Quite definitively not the types of stories I'm drawn to (too slow, too rural, too much description of the weather and landscape), yet each that I've read, slowly, winds its way to being very affecting: "In the Fall" (about a horse, and also endurance), "The Boat" (father and son and the sea), "The Lost Salt Gift of Blood" (my favourite I think - man returns to visit the parents of his dead former lover, and finds his son) and "The Road to Rankin's Point" (in which death hangs over a mountain road and the house at its end).
(the second time someone's given this to me - this time Hayley, previously and more than a decade ago Ruth)
Lorrie Moore - Birds of America
As it happens I'm also four stories into this, but by contrast to the Munro and the MacLeod, Moore is a breeze to read (which I already knew from Self-Help). Funny and sad, and in the patterns of her narrator-protagonists' thinking I can see her influence on more than one of my latter-day favourites, most notably Rivka Galchen.
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
I can't think of another word than 'genius'. Davis has hit upon and refined a style so much her own and so elegantly muscular. I can't read too much of her at any one time, but I can't imagine tiring of her either.
Clarice Lispector - Complete Stories
I've really only dipped into these and they are fabulously strange. Deep waters.
Alice Munro - Runaway
I've read the title story - which is pretty much perfect - and the three after it, which are all about Juliet: "Chance", "Soon" and "Silence". I admire these more than love them; they're deep and fine; they shed light on life.
(a gift from Sarah M & Ben)
Alistair MacLeod - Island
Quite definitively not the types of stories I'm drawn to (too slow, too rural, too much description of the weather and landscape), yet each that I've read, slowly, winds its way to being very affecting: "In the Fall" (about a horse, and also endurance), "The Boat" (father and son and the sea), "The Lost Salt Gift of Blood" (my favourite I think - man returns to visit the parents of his dead former lover, and finds his son) and "The Road to Rankin's Point" (in which death hangs over a mountain road and the house at its end).
(the second time someone's given this to me - this time Hayley, previously and more than a decade ago Ruth)
Lorrie Moore - Birds of America
As it happens I'm also four stories into this, but by contrast to the Munro and the MacLeod, Moore is a breeze to read (which I already knew from Self-Help). Funny and sad, and in the patterns of her narrator-protagonists' thinking I can see her influence on more than one of my latter-day favourites, most notably Rivka Galchen.
