How to Write A Short Story

摘要

Alice munro spins tales that show us, again and again, and with wondrous grace, how much can be done in a simple short story. Yet the 74-year-old Canadian does it by breaking every rule ever taught in a writing seminar, setting up a master class along the sidelines. Her latest—her 11th—collection of stories, The View from Castle Rock (Knopf; 349 pages), marks a departure from her usual examinations of women in rural Canada leaving home to remake their possibilities by drawing instead on family documents, his- torical records (from 19th century Scotland) and what feels like memoir to piece together, in 12 parts, a fictionalized chronicle of how her tough-minded clan got from the Ettrick Valley near Edinburgh to America. Yet it shows, as usual, how to draw gasps from other writers by defying the laws of gravitas as effortlessly as Michael Jordan defied those of gravity.