Excerpt

When I reach the Pearly Gates, I know that I have the perfect password to get in. Even if St. Peter is at his grumpy, bureaucratic worst -- “So what have you ever done in your miserable, selfish life to deserve getting into Heaven?” -- I can waltz in simply by saying: “I kept Alice Munro writing short stories.” -- Douglas Gibson

Description

This rich volume begins with a very good-humoured memoir by Munro’s renowned Canadian publisher, Douglas Gibson, followed by powerful autobiographical pieces by fiction writers, playwrights, poets, and historians. Overall, the twenty contributions to Alice Munro Country, including a previously unpublished interview with Munro by J. R. (Tim) Struthers and a superb essay by George Elliott Clarke on Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women, take a cultural or historical or personal approach, while also providing judicious readings of the subtle literary dimensions of key Munro works.

Reviews

The two volumes thus form a compendium of essays on important, well-established critical paths into Munro’s work—on place, on ending—making existing articles available in book form and offering fresh ones on these topics, with many truly enlightening contributions.

- Canadian Literature: A Quarterly of Criticism and Review