Alice Munro
Story Stream
Alice Munro’s Passive Voice December 24, 2024
“I am a writer or used to be a writer,” Alice Munro wrote in 2014, in one of the last stories she tried to compose. A year earlier, she had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. But she had Alzheimer’s and had been in decline for several years. Her part...
Alice Munro’s Retreat November 26, 2024
In July, two months after Alice Munro died, her daughter Andrea Skinner revealed not only that she had been sexually abused by her stepfather for several years starting when she was nine but that when confronted with this truth sixteen years later he...
Monstrous Things September 03, 2024
It’s hard for a novelist to make a double axe-murderer sympathetic, especially when his victims are an old woman and her mentally disabled half-sister. In addition to which, this murderer is a remorseless antisemite who rationalises his motives and c...
What Alice Munro Knew July 24, 2024
Just over a decade ago, when James Wood wrote about four memoirs by the children of writers, I wondered why he’d left out Sheila Munro’s Lives of Mothers & Daughters: Growing Up With Alice Munro (2001). True, Wood’s essay, “Sins of the Father,” was a...
The Writer and the Brute July 11, 2024
If you love Alice Munro’s fiction, you’ve likely spent much of the past few days wondering: How could an artist so sensitive and astute behave with such callous selfishness toward her own child? There’s so much to be appalled by in the Toronto Star’s...
Was Alice Munro An Art Monster? July 10, 2024
Alice Munro, considered one of the greatest short-story writers of modern times, was a monster.The world learned this on Sunday, within moments of the Toronto Star hitting “publish” on an essay by Munro’s daughter, Andrea Skinner. The title of the es...
Alice Munro Was the Writer’s Writer May 16, 2024
“The stories of Alice Munro,” the American writer Ethan Canin is said to have once remarked, “make everyone else’s look like the work of babies.” It is not the highest praise the Canadian writer has ever received – over the course of her decades-long...
Alice Munro Reinvigorated the Short Story May 16, 2024
“I was brought up to believe that the worst thing you could do was ‘call attention to yourself,’ or ‘think you were smart,’ ” Alice Munro, who died on Monday, at age ninety-two, once said. She rebelled against this edict, of course, but it stayed wit...
Alice Munro, Master of the Short Story, Dies at 92 May 15, 2024
Alice Munro, the revered Canadian author who started writing short stories because she did not think she had the time or the talent to master novels, then stubbornly dedicated her long career to churning out psychologically dense stories that dazzled...
