Alice Munro Country: Essays on Her Works I: 51 (Essential Writers Series)

This rich volume begins with a very good-humoured memoir, "Alice Munro: Not Bad Short Story Writer"; by Munro's renowned Canadian publisher, Douglas Gibson, followed by powerful autobiographical pieces by fiction writer Jack Hodgins, playwright Judith Thompson, poet John B. Lee, poet-playwright-teacher James Reaney, and local historian Reg Thompson. Overall, the twenty contributions to Alice Munro Country, including a previously unpublished interview with Munro by J.R. (Tim) Struthers and a superb essay by George Elliott Clarke on Munro's Lives of Girls and Women, take a cultural or historical or personal approach, while also providing judicious readings of the subtle literary dimensions of key Munro works.

J.R. (TIM) STRUTHERS has edited some thirty volumes of theory, criticism, autobiography, short stories, and poetry. Among these titles are his two collections for Guernica Editions on Clark Blaise, then his three collections for Guernica Editions on Alice Munro, and now this book in honour of Len Gasparini. Tim has been publishing on Canadian literature for some fifty years, beginning, in 1975, with the first two scholarly articles worldwide on Alice Munro and including, in 2024, the critically and formally innovative co-authored study Reading Alice Munro’s Breakthrough Books: A Suite in Four Voices. Like writers James Reaney and Alice Munro and Len Gasparini, Tim was born and raised in Southwestern Ontario, where he still happily resides, now writing and editing and publishing full-time following a fifty-year career of university teaching.