Издания и произведения

Nothing in literature is more difficult than the depiction of commonplace reality. Only the greatest have succeeded in the task. In the novel form we think immediately of Flaubert, of the opening sections of Joyce's Ulysses. Among short-story writers there is Chekhov, of course, and Joyce again in Dubliners. These wonderful artists do not write about reality: their work is reality itself. Reading them, we forget that we are experiencing a highly wrought and mediated version of the world. Emma Bovary dying; Leopold Bloom serving his wife breakfast in bed; the lady with the little dog falling haplessly in love and out and in again; Gabriel Conroy staring into the snowy wastes of his marriage and of his selfhood- all this strikes us with the force of lived life, immediate, graspable, at once mundane and sublime.

Collected Stories