A master yarn-spinner, he is unabashedly, joyously (but never aggressively) descriptive, with muscular prose animated by a muscular sense of poetry. Not only are his stories in which things actually *happen* -- ships jumped, pot grown, gloryholes visited, bear traps sprung, dirt secreted by the

Baroque, Expansive, Grand, Low realism

Imagine the short story as poetry. And imagine that Alice Munro isn't merely a writer -- she is a literary alchemist, stirring, distilling, testing, and violating the language and conventions of the short story with breathtaking results. As fellow short-story writer Lorrie Moore observed, "It's the s

Composed, Dense, Domestic, Elegant, Low realism

Irvine Welsh was born in 1958 in Leith, an area that had been incorporated into Edinburgh in much the same way that Scotland itself had been colonized by England. So his -- and his characters' -- congenital resentment towards the world in general is not too surprising. After dropping out of school at

Dystopic, Funny, Gritty, Low realism, Postmodern fiction, Profane, Slangy, Urban