Alice Munro, short fiction's champion

摘要

Is the short story enjoying a renaissance? The genre of choice for writers as highly regarded as Jorge Luis Borges and John Cheever, short fiction in the past decade has got shorter and shorter shrift from publishers who believe it does not sell. That may be changing.rnJust over a year ago, Jhumpa Lahiri's second collection, "Unaccustomed Earth", leapt straight to the top of the New York Times bestseller list in its first week of publication. "Occasionally a comet lands and flattens the forest, sending the usual critters running," one of the paper's bloggers commented. Then the London Sunday Times, usually a forum for bloody foreign reporting or high fashion, began commissioning short fiction of its own from such authors as Lionel Shriver and Ben Okri.rnOn May 27th the short story raised its longest applause yet when it was announced that Alice Munro, a 77-year-old Canadian, had won the Man Booker international prize, the first time a short-story writer has carried the day.