Wednesday's Writerly Happenings

Today’s news tells of Alice Munroe’s winning the Man Booker Prize, Gary Snyder deciding that he can go home again, Tobias Wolff and other short story writers describing the brotherly experience, charges of sexism in Oxford’s poetry realm, and a new novel by Lisa See called the Shanghai Girls, about Chinese immigrants entering the United States circa World War II.

– There are writers who inspire, writers who capture the imaginations and loyalty of their readers for life and who also become mentors to their peers. Canadian virtuoso Alice Munro defies all superlatives; this daring observer of the ordinary is the only living practitioner of the short story to be consistently mentioned in the same breath as William Trevor. By honouring Munro, mere weeks short of her 78th birthday on July 10th, the judges of this, the third biennial International Man Booker Prize, have acknowledged that literary genius is contained in the palm of the hand, in the blink of an eye, in that nuanced sentence, in a knowing glance, the angle of a character’s shoulders as they walk away — Alice Munroe in the Irish Times

– One of America’s most celebrated environmental writers and a lifelong conservationist, Snyder returned to his boyhood home Tuesday in Lake City. He is in town for a reading tonight at Benaroya Hall, part of the Seattle Arts & Lectures series — Gary Snyder in the Seattle Times

– At the end of his essay “A Brother’s Story,” Tobias Wolff writes, “The good luck of having a brother is partly the luck of having stories to tell.” Andrew Blauner includes “A Brother’s Story” in his new anthology, “Brothers: 26 Stories of Love and Rivalry,” along with pieces by the other Wolff son (Geoffrey), Richard Ford, John Edgar Wideman, Pete Hamill, Phillip Lopate, David Sedaris, Dominick Dunne, Jim Shepard, David Kaczynski (brother of the Unabomber), the Cheever boys (Benjamin and Fred) and the Rich kids (Nathaniel and Simon), among others — Tobias Wolff in Paper Cuts

– Yesterday, Ruth Padel vacated the post of Oxford Poetry Professor, which she won in an election just nine days earlier, caught up in the same scandal that took Derek Walcott out of the running a few weeks ago. Walcott left the race after an anonymous letter campaign dredged up an old sexual harassment claim against him; now Padel stands accused of tipping journalists off about said claim. In a statement Monday, she said, “I genuinely believe that I did nothing intentional that led to Derek Walcott’s withdrawal from the election.” — Ruth Padel in the New Yorker

– In Shanghai Girls, a new novel by Lisa See, sisters May and Pearl Chin glide around Shanghai in rickshaws wearing gorgeous, tightfitting silk dresses. It’s 1937, just before the Japanese invaded China during World War II, and their lives are about to be upended — Lisa See in NPR