The literary news of the day is that Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her name has been bandied about for years in reference to the prize. Lessing’s own story is one of defiance and will in the face of the very limited role women were allowed. In response to the charge that her portrayal of Anna Wulf in The Golden Notebook was “unfeminine,” she noted "Apparently what many women were thinking, feeling, experiencing came as a great surprise." I remember reading The Golden Notebook a number of years ago and feeling that excitement of discovery that I had when I first read Virginia Woolf.

The Nobel Prize isn’t the only buzz of the week, though. The finalists for The National Book Award were announced as well. They are a varied bunch of authors and works, but all worthy contenders. Among the fiction selections is Tree of Smoke, the Denis Johnson marvel that I wrote about a couple of weeks back. Also, Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the End and Mischa Berlinski’s Fieldwork are nominated. In addition, two story collections are in the mix: Lydia Davis’ Varieties of Disturbance and Jim Shepard’s Like You’d Understand, Anyway.

I took Davis’ book on my recent trip to Los Angeles and read a few of the stories. I’m a great fan of the short story and Lydia Davis’ are quite elegant. Though they are short and sometimes seem almost flip in tone, they congregate together and form larger themes of angst and recrimination.