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.’”
Yesterday, The New Yorker commented that, although she wrote 15 novels, it was “through her short fiction Gordimer made her presence felt the most.” Gordimer published her very first short story, “Come Again Tomorrow,” in a Johannesburg magazine in 1938, when she was just 15 years old. Thirteen years later, there came another first — the first of many stories she published in The New Yorker (“A Watcher of the Deadâ€). Although many of Gordimer’s New Yorker stories remain locked up, available only to the magazine’s subscribers, we’ve managed to dig up several open ones. Above, you can watch Gordimer read her 1999 story called “Loot” while visiting Harvard University in 2005. The text has since been re-published on the Nobel Prize web site. Below, you can also listen to author Tessa Hadley read “City Lovers,” first published in The New Yorker in 1975. The story “focusses on a love affair between a white man and a ‘colored’ woman in Apartheid South Africa. It’s deeply political in its details—the man is a geologist at a mining company, the couple’s affair is illegal, and they cover it up by pretending that she is his servant. “
Other Gordimer stories available online include “The First Sense” and “A Beneficiary”, published respectively in The New Yorker in 2006 and 2007. “The Second Sense” came out in The Virginia Quarterly, also in 2007. If you, dear Open Culture readers, happen to know of any other Gordimer stories published online, please let us know in the comments sections below, and we’ll add them to the roundup.
Related Content
550 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free
Read 18 Short Stories From Nobel Prize-Winning Writer Alice Munro Free Online
10 Free Stories by George Saunders, Author of Tenth of December
Neil Gaiman’s Free Short Stories
30 Free Essays & Stories by David Foster Wallace on the Web
600 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices
5 Free Short Stories by Nadine Gordimer is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don’t miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.
The post 5 Free Short Stories by Nadine Gordimer appeared first on Open Culture.
5 Free Short Stories by Nadine Gordimer
No comments:
Post a Comment