Reading Alice Munro, 1973-2013

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.

About the Author :
Robert Thacker is a professor of Canadian Studies and English at St. Lawrence University. He is the author of Munro's biography Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives (2005, revised 2011) and the editor of The Rest of the Story: Critical Essays on Alice Munro (1999).

Review :
"Reading Alice Munro, 19732013 brings together 16 essays written over four decades and it aims to track a perpetually deepening fascination with Munros writing, and because of that writing and its effects, with her life and the trajectory of her writing career (p. 4). Thacker introduces us to Munro and to Munro criticism and, in so doing, define[s] her emergence and contextualise[s] that emergence within Canadian literature during the last decades of the previous century and the first years of the current one (p. 18). Reading Alice Munro, 19732013 epitomizes the value of scholarly dedication and of single-author studies: Thackers own is a source of considerable inspiration and it is doubly refreshing to see how his voice grew even as Munros did. The critical reflection, a mode that Thacker employed to great effect in both the books introduction and afterword, makesan especially strong case for archival research." - Tom Ue, University of Toronto Scarborough, British Journal of Canadian Studies, Vol. 30, Issue 2. We have here a retrospective not only of a critical writer but also of a reader - perhaps Munroeâs most public readerâ| Throughout forty years and more, Thacker has devoted the greater share of his career to the study of Munroeâs writingâ| [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