Alice Munro Country

This rich volume begins with a very good-humoured memoir, "Alice Munro: Not Bad Short Story Writer," by Munro's renowned Canadian publisher, Douglas Gibson, followed by powerful autobiographical pieces by fiction writer Jack Hodgins, playwright Judith Thompson, poet John B. Lee, poet-playwright-teacher James Reaney, and local historian Reg Thompson. Overall, the twenty contributions to Alice Munro Country, including a previously unpublished interview with Munro by J.R. (Tim) Struthers and a superb essay by George Elliott Clarke on Munro's Lives of Girls and Women, take a cultural or historical or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. By way of a summation of Munro's formidably original achievement, the volume offers a series of three stylistically innovative and analytically insightful essays by Ailsa Cox, Louis K. MacKendrick, and Marianne Micros on Munro's "Meneseteung," the one story by a Canadian writer selected for the anthology The Best American Short Stories of the Century. The volume then finishes with the editor's merrily conceived, researched, and introduced, not to mention indispensable, 401-item "A Bibliographical Tour of Alice Munro Country." Collectively, the many different contributions to Alice Munro Country and Alice Munro Everlasting offer a new model for the art of the critical essay -- combining imagination and analysis, personal testimony and scholarship. They are intended equally to honour the genius of Alice Munro and to give enjoyment to all interested readers. And as one excited advance reader remarked, "I imagine that these two books will form the core of Alice Munro studies in the future."