Colin Nicholson

4. Alistair MacLeod

Short Stories, making him the only Canadian to have been recognized twice in this way. In the first instance, and in the company of work by Bernard Malamud, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Sylvia Plath, ’The Boat’ was judged one of the best twenty short stories published in North America in 1969. Several other tales by MacLeod have either been selected for the roll of honour, or listed as distinctive in The Year Book of the American Short Story. On its publication in 1976, his collection, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood,’ I received outstanding reviews entirely characterized by the welcoming enthusiasm, recorded on the book’s s