Reading Alice Munro's Breakthrough Books

Reviews / Votes

The four co-authors of Reading Alice Munro's Breakthrough Books: A Suite in Four Voices [...] have all been reading Munro for several decades and keep coming back to her short fiction, finding more to it with each re-reading. As a quartet, the image of the musical suite in the subtitle points at a combination of diversity and complementariness among them, in a composition meant to reveal and educate. -- Christine Lorre * Journal of the Short Story in English * This book is a breakthrough in Munro critical scholarship. A collaboratively authored project by four Munro specialists, for the first time it foregrounds the Nobel Prize winner's four mid-career short story collections and her innovative reshaping of the genre. A revelatory reading of the multilayered narrative complexity which is Munro's distinctive signature. -- Coral Ann Howells, University of Reading / University of London The pleasure in these essays is that they are less essays than passionate engagements with Munro's words, sentences and punctuation. They do not ask of the stories What but, rather, How. Each essay on what is terra incognita leaves us gazing out, silent, as it were, upon a peak in Darien. These are by far the best illuminations of Munro's work yet written. -- John Metcalf, writer and fiction editor at Biblioasis Press Alice Munro is largely responsible for rescuing the short story from being overshadowed by the novel. The four critics here demonstrate how Munro moved from telling stories to creating complex explorations of reality as multilayers of memory and perspective. -- Charles E. May, California State University, Long Beach As Alice Munro's stories grew, and their plots enfolded, they rarely strayed from the southwest Ontario-"Munro Country"-of her birth. We accepted their authenticity, and suspected, but never confirmed, an autobiographical impulse. This meticulous and timely study lifts the folds and disentangles a distressed life from her consummate art. -- Clark Blaise The contributors to this book have done an incredible job in addressing Alice Munro's talent, her understanding of the short story as a window to life, ever expanding, ever progressing, in search of life and its own essence. I highly recommend that you read it. -- Maurice A. Lee, Director of the biennial International Conference on the Short Story in English