Good for her!

I opened my email this morning to find this: Munro wins international Booker

Canadian short story author Alice Munro has won the third Man Booker International Prize.

She saw off competition from 13 other nominees, including Australian two-time Booker winner Peter Carey and Briton James Kelman, to win the £60,000 award.

[The judge's statement read:] "Alice Munro is mostly known as a short story writer and yet she brings as much depth, wisdom and precision to every story as most novelists bring to a lifetime of novels.

"To read Alice Munro is to learn something every time that you never thought of before."

...which I agree with.

I tend to be suspicious of so-called "literary" fiction. I've read a lot of it over the years that, frankly, isn't that good, and I've noticed as I read that the stories are often as formulaic as their "popular" equivalent.

But Alice Munro really deserves all the praise she gets. Her short stories are amazing examples of craftsmanship. When you're reading them, you really feel like you know the people she's talking about. Her well-turned sentences are almost invisible, because they serve the story, as opposed to trying to draw attention to their calculatedly arch "cleverness."

So, if you have time to read a short story, here's The Bear Came over the Mountain. It was turned into the movie "Away From Her," which came out a few years ago.

Very interesting

Attn, all ye cloak and dagger people:

Spy Fired Shot That Changed West Germany

It was called “the shot that changed the republic.”

The killing in 1967 of an unarmed demonstrator by a police officer in West Berlin set off a left-wing protest movement and put conservative West Germany on course to evolve into the progressive country it has become today.

Now a discovery in the archives of the East German secret police, known as the Stasi, has upended Germany’s perception of its postwar history. The killer, Karl-Heinz Kurras, though working for the West Berlin police, was at the time also acting as a Stasi spy for East Germany.

It is as if the shooting deaths of four students at Kent State University by the Ohio National Guard had been committed by an undercover K.G.B. officer, though the reverberations in Germany seemed to have run deeper...