Alice Munro anyone?

[papayahed]

I've just read a few short stories, pretty good and just a little twisted.

[JBI]

I've read several of her collections - it's interesting to see how she manipulates the genre of short stories as her works progress. At first, she would have to write only on her spare time, and in private, so her first collection has some quite shorter length stories, but by the most current ones, she has novella length stories. Really though, she is such an informed story writer, especially when one considers the vastness of text that she has absorbed and incorporated - she really is one that is highly informed by text, and very well read.

Into the stories themselves, they seem to anticipate the post-structuralist movement into gender studies, especially the works of Judith Butler. Her theory of acting as gender came some 20 odd years before Butler, and seems far more convincing than Butler's arguments, which are interesting, and she really seems to have anticipated much late-20th century scholarship.

Her works however, are strange sometimes, as some readers find tragedy, where there is intentional comedy. For instance, the collection Who Do you Think You Are? has often been thought of as the tragedy of its heroine's life (all the stories involve the character of Rose), but in reality, some critics have argued, and Munro has agreed, that the collection forms a Carnivalesque comedy, heavily informed by Bakhtinian thought. I think that is what makes it interesting, there is a sense of dialogism mixed in within the the bildungsroman, to the point where one questions, if what is really behind her whole concept of character is not just the concept of community action, and the assigning of roles as fitting to the group. Certainly her characters from a poor upbringing seem to have that strong tinge, and in the story "Half A Grapefruit" from Who Do You Think You Are? one can't help but notice that. In fact, that collection seems to ask that question, in more than just in relation to humbling, it seems to ask really, who are we?

[dfloyd]

in the Last of the Mohican's by Fenimore Cooper?

[papayahed]

So I came across some of her collections but wasn't sure which to buy.

[JBI]

Get Who Do you Think You Are? or Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You. Those are my favorite, at least.

[papayahed]

Darn, where were you an hour ago?

[JBI]

Darn, where were you an hour ago?

Which'd you buy?

[papayahed]

Don't Stop the Carnival by Herman Wouk (It was a suggestion AND Jimmy Buffett and Herman Wouk turned it into a musical - how can a parrothead pass that up?)