Nadine gordimer short stories

By now, you know that Nadine Gordimer has died. She was 90 years old. Back in 1991, when she won the Nobel Prize, The New York Times made this announce­ment:

Nadine Gordimer, whose nov­els of South Africa por­tray the con­flicts and con­tra­dic­tions of a racist soci­ety, was named win­ner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Lit­er­a­ture today as her coun­try final­ly begins to dis­man­tle the sys­tem her works have poignant­ly explored for more than 40 years.

In a brief cita­tion, the Swedish Acad­e­my, which con­fers the awards, referred to her as “Nadine Gordimer, who through her mag­nif­i­cent epic writ­ing has — in the words of Alfred Nobel — been of very great ben­e­fit to human­i­ty.”

The acad­e­my also added that “her con­tin­u­al involve­ment on behalf of lit­er­a­ture and free speech in a police state where cen­sor­ship and per­se­cu­tion of books and peo­ple exist have made her ‘the doyenne of South African let­ters.’ ”

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Five short stories you can read right now to appreciate what made Nadine Gordimer great

South African author Nadine Gordimer, one of the world’s most powerful anti-apartheid voices, died Sunday, July 13, in her Johannesburg home at the age of 90, according to a statement from her family.

Gordimer, who won the 1991 Nobel Prize for literature, was known for her political work. Many of her novels and short stories focused on the South African apartheid debate, and later on censorship and HIV/AIDS. A prolific writer, Gordimer published 13 novels and 21 collections of short stories, as well as a few books of personal essays.

Whether you are a newcomer to the works of Gordimer or a life-long reader, her death may have inspired you to explore the works that won her a Nobel prize, a place of prominence in the literary canon, and the admiration of millions of readers.

To get you started, here are six must-reads stories from Gordimer. Consider this your guide to developing, or re-d

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“The Flash of Fireflies”: a visual take on the short story

1Nadine Gordimer has often been hailed as a realist writer, even a social realist one, but reading her novels and especially her short stories, one cannot help but be struck by the presence, as if looming in the background, of the uncanny. Persistent, unusual, even unheimlich1 situations or events reveal another side of the writer’s art showing she could use all the tools a writer has at her fingertips to reach her aim. Gordimer always insisted that she started writing as a young fifteen-year old in a mining town and that she was chosen by the situation, and did not choose it herself. She happened to be a writer writing in South Africa but first and foremost she was a writer. In her introduction to her Selected Stories published in 1975, she insists on her own take on what a commitment is and simultaneously addresses the (im)possibility of defining the elusive form of the short story compared to that of the novel:

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