Blown Away by Alice Munro

Cathleen Schine
by Alice Munro
The New York Review of Books
January 10, 2013

Derek Shapton  

Alice Munro in her backyard, Clinton, Ontario, circa 2004

Alice Munro is not only revered, she is cherished, her stories handled lovingly, turned over and over, gazed at and studied and breathed in with something approaching awe. She has never, over the years, written the way any of her contemporaries have. Her stories are open, overflowing with life, unlike the curt and obscure minimalist stories so fashionable in the Seventies and Eighties. But no one could accuse her of being traditional, either. With all their fullness of narrative and character, her stories are elegant and sharp, pared down—sometimes shockingly so. Her new collection, Dear Life, is as rich and astonishing as anything she has done before.

Munro’s stories, in this book as in her earlier work, tend to be geographically concentrated, often based in a small town in Huron County, Ontario, or, sometimes, in Vancouver, British Columbia. They can, on the other hand, cover a vast expanse of temporal ground, passing through years, decades, eras, in a paragraph, even in a sentence. There are dramatic events: sudden deaths, disappearances, reappearances, beatings, misunderstandings, and improbable coincidences—but the stories do not often revolve around them.

Alice Munro Wins Nobel Prize in Literature

Ian Willms for The New York Times

Alice Munro at her home in Clinton, Ontario. Canadians expressed pride over her Nobel honor.

By JULIE BOSMAN

The New York Times: October 10, 2013 

Alice Munro, the renowned Canadian short-story writer whose visceral work explores the tangled relationships between men and women, small-town existence and the fallibility of memory, won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday.

Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy said that Ms. Munro, 82, who has written 14 story collections, was a “master of the contemporary short story.” She is the 13th woman to win the prize.

The selection of Ms. Munro was greeted with an outpouring of enthusiasm in the English-speaking world, a temporary relief from recent years when the Swedish Academy chose winners who were obscure, difficult to comprehend or overtly political.

Alice Munro Puts Down Her Pen to Let the World In

by CHARLES McGRATH The New York Times : July 1, 2013

CLINTON, Ontario — Accepting a literary prize in Toronto last month, Alice Munro, the acclaimed short-story writer — “our Chekhov,” as Cynthia Ozick has called her — winner of the Man Booker International Prize and just about every important North American literary award for which she is eligible, told a newspaper interviewer, “I’m probably not going to write anymore.”

Ian Willms for The New York Times

Alice Munro near her bungalow in Clinton, Ontario, a small town like those in her renowned works of short fiction. 

Ms. Munro, who will turn 82 next week, has talked this way before. In 2006 she told a writer from The Toronto Globe and Mail, “I don’t know if I have the energy to do this anymore.” She then went on to publish yet another story collection, her 14th, called “Dear Life.” It came out last fall, and reviewers, as usual, remarked on her insightful handling of themes like the bleakness of small-town life; the eruptive, transforming power of sex; and the trouble women have making their way in a world run by men.

Master of the Intricacies of the Human Hear. Alice Munro, Nobel Winner, Mines the Inner Lives of Girls and Women

An Appraisal

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

The New York Times: October 10, 2013

Alice Munro, named on Thursday as the winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, once observed: “The complexity of things — the things within things — just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.”

Alice Munro earlier this year.

Alice Munro’s home in Clinton, Ontario, Canada. 

That is also a perfect description of Ms. Munro’s quietly radiant short stories — stories that have established her as one of the foremost practitioners of the form. Set largely in small-town and rural Canada and often focused on the lives of girls and women, her tales have the swoop and density of big, intimate novels, mapping the crevices of characters’ hearts with cleareyed Chekhovian empathy and wisdom.

Fluent and deceptively artless on the page, these stories are actually amazingly intricate constructions that move back and forth in time, back and forth between reality and memory, opening out, magically, to disclose the long panoramic vistas in these people’s lives (the starts, stops and reversals that stand out as hinge moments in their personal histories) and the homely details of their day-to-day routines: the dull coping with “food and mess and houses” that can take up so much of their heroines’ time.