Alice Munro's Late Style

Robert Thacker is Charles A. Dana Professor of Canadian Studies and English Emeritus at St. Lawrence University, New York, USA. He has been working on 2013 Nobel Laureate Alice Munro since the mid-1970s and is now among the world’s leading Munro critics. He is author of Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives: A Biography (2005; updated 2011), written with Munro’s cooperation, and Reading Alice Munro, 1973-2013 (2016; open access). He edited The Rest of the Story: Critical Essays on Alice Munro (1999) and Alice Munro: Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage; Runaway; Dear Life (2016) in Bloomsbury’s Studies in Contemporary North American Fiction series.

Anyone intrigued at the prospect of learning much more about Alice Munro as an individual writer and person and about the fascinating process of writing, editing, and rewriting could not find a better researched or more engaging guide and inspiration than Robert Thacker’s Alice Munro’s Late Style.

• Preface: “I want to do this with honour, if I possible can”Introduction: Of Late Styles and Alice MunroChapter One: “maybe I can do something unexpected with it”: Imagining The View from Castle RockChapter Two: “it is difficult to decide what works in a book of this sort”: The Making of The View from Castle RockChapter Three: “It has some real Munrovian highlights”: “The View from Castle Rock” and The View from Castle RockChapter Four: “and then another little story comes along and that solves how life has got to be”: The Recursions of Too Much HappinessChapter Five: “it seemed as if we had gotten time back, as if there was all the time in the world”: The Gathering of Stories Before the “Finale” to Dear LifeChapter Six: “Simple Truth”: “Too Much Happiness” and the “Finale” to Dear LifeEpilogue: “to have got my chance to do it, as well as I could”: Alice Munro FinisIndex