The Alices

As I was typing my post on 9/23/10, I started to type Alice McDermott's name but accidentally typed "Alice Hoffman" instead. I immediately realized my mistake and corrected it, but it reminded me of how many contemporary authors there are with the first name Alice. There's one of my very favorite writers, Canadian writer Alice Munro (whom I posted about on 7/22/10); Munro is considered by many to be the greatest short story writer alive, and a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature. There is the above-mentioned novelist Alice McDermott, who writes about Irish-American Catholic families in Long Island and Brooklyn. There's Alice Hoffman, also mentioned above, whose novels often include a touch of magic. There is the womanist/feminist, activist, African-American writer Alice Walker (whom I wrote about here on 5/26/10). There's Alice Sebold, author of the haunting novel "The Lovely Bones." And although she died a few years ago, I want to pay tribute to novelist and short story writer Alice Adams, who lived in and wrote about San Francisco; I felt I "knew" the neighborhoods and the women she wrote about. Consider this post an ode of gratitude to these fine writers, these Alices, whose fiction has given me such pleasure.