Reading Alice Munro, 1973-2013
Description
In Reading Alice Munro, 1973-2013, the world's leading Munro scholar offers a critical overview of Alice Munro and her writing spanning forty years. Beginning with a newly written overarching introduction, featuring directive interleaved commentaries addressing chronology and contexts, ending with encompassing afterword, this collection provides a selection of essays and reviews that reflect their times and tell the story of Munro's emergence and recognition as an internationally acclaimed writer since the 1970s. Acknowledging her beginnings and her persistence as a writer of increasingly exceptional short stories, and just short stories, it treats her career through Thacker's criticism up to her fourteenth collection, Dear Life (2012), and to the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature. Altogether, this book encompasses the whole trajectory of Munro's critical presence while offering a singularly informed retrospective perspective.
Reviews
We have here a retrospective not only of a critical writer but also of a reader - perhaps Munroe’s most public reader… Throughout forty years and more, Thacker has devoted the greater share of his career to the study of Munroe’s writing… [This] is, in effect, a reassessment of a scholarly life - a professional autobiography in critical essays and reviews - devoted to a writer whose persistent concern was the act of reassessment.
- Lorraine York, Canadian Literature
Thacker is distinguished among Munroe critics . . . a valuable scholarly resource.
- Sara Jamieson, University of Toronto Quarterly