Among the many reactions to Alice Munro’s well-deserved winning of the Man Booker International Prize, one of the more interesting is that of The New Yorker, the magazine that has published the lion’s share of Munro’s stories over the decades.
On The Book Bench, the magazine’s book blog, Willing Davidson claims that “the arrival of a Munro story in the fiction department is always an event – her typescript pages, with their oddly bolded paragraphs, produce an almost atavistic salivary response.”
Really? They actually salivate when a new story arrives? Munro’s stories are great and all, but you know you’ve perhaps given over too much of your life to literature when you find yourself preparing to eat one.
Though, given how dry Munro’s prose style can be, perhaps a little spit is exactly what’s needed.
[...] Man Booker International. The reaction of the pundits seems to be a happy, calm unanimity. Or not (hello [...]
Who the eff are you? Given the low quality of the sarcasm here–in turn the lowest form of commentary–you are in no position to judge either Munro or the New Yorker.
I gotta say, I was pretty turned off by this comment, too. The elitist sarcasm on this blog has really become very tiresome.
Oh come on, he’s poking fun at a stodgy institution for being elitist. Good article Nathan, people need to chill the ‘eff’ out.
The ’stodgy elitist institution’ argument is a horse that has been flogged to death. This snarky commentary serves no purpose other than to amuse the author of the post, and I suppose the various readers who snigger at its clever nastiness.
I have noticed an increasing level of meanness in this blog recently, which I think is sad, and does a great disservice to Q&Q.
Oh, and congratulations to Ms. Munro.
Can you point out to me exactly what portion of this blog post is mean? Alice Munro’s prose style can be a little dry? Is that the clever nastiness you’re speaking of?
This piece is nothing more than a short article on a funny reaction to literary news. It’s okay, both Ms. Munro and The New Yorker can take a little ribbing now and again. They’re grown ups.
Hey, this is CanLit dagnabit, no humour allowed!
What’s mean and nasty, you ask? I’ll tell you . . . limply offering “well-deserved” where only “monumentally deserved” or “enormously merited” will suffice. This is an outrage, Whitlock.