This is the book about one of the world’s great authors, Alice Munro, which shows how her life and her stories intertwine.For almost thirty years Robert Thacker has been researching this book, steeping himself in Alice Munro’s life and work, working with her co-operation to make it complete. The result is a feast of information for Alice Munro’s admirers everywhere.By following “the parallel tracks” of Alice Munro’s life and Alice Munro’s texts, he gives a thorough...

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...

The awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to the Canadian writer Alice Munro in 2013 confirmed her position as a master of the short story form. This book explores Munro's work from a full range of critical perspectives, focussing on three of her most popular and important published collections: Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001), Runaway (2004), and her final collection Dear Life (2012). With chapters written by the world's leading cr...

Focusing on Alice Munro's last three collections, this book examines the differences between these volumes and the rest of her work to analyse the emergence and the difference of her 'late style'.Alice Munro has effectively reshaped the short story as a form. This book focuses on Munro's art of recursion - an approach that has been evident throughout her career but came to the fore in her last three books, The View from Castle Rock (2006), Too Much Happiness (2009)...

Before she wrote her prose masterpieces, Willa Cather produced striking poems, which were collected in 1903 in April Twilights. It was her literary debut, preceding the publication of O Pioneers! by nine years. In her introduction, distinguished Cather scholar Bernice Slote notes that this early edition of April Twilights restores what had been "an almost lost, certainly blurred, portion of the creative life of a great novelist."Among the thirty-seven sel...

Willa Cather at the Modernist Crux examines Willa Cather’s position in time, in aesthetics, and in the world. Born a Victorian in 1873, Cather made herself a modernist through the poems, stories, and novels she wrote and published into the twentieth century. Beginning with a prologue locating Cather’s position, this volume of Cather Studies offers three sets of related essays.The first section takes up Cather’s beginnings with her late nineteenth-century cultural influence...

Maya Angelou, one of the best-loved authors of our time shares the wisdom of a remarkable life in this bestselling spiritual classic.This is Maya Angelou talking from the heart, down to earth and real, but also inspiring. This is a book to be treasured, a book about being in all ways a woman, about living well, about the power of the word, and about the power of spirituality to move and shape your life. Passionate, lively, and lyrical, Maya Angelou’s latest unforge...

In eight stories, a master of the form extends and magnifies her great themes—the vagaries of love, the passion that leads down unexpected paths, the chaos hovering just under the surface of things, and the strange, often comical desires of the human heart.Time stretches out in some of the stories: a man and a woman look back forty years to the summer they met—the summer, as it turns out, that the true nature of their lives was revealed. In others time is telescope...

In her lengthy and fascinating introduction Margaret Atwood says “Alice Munro is among the major writers of English fiction of our time. . . . Among writers themselves, her name is spoken in hushed tones.”This splendid gift edition is sure to delight Alice Munro’s growing body of admirers, what Atwood calls her “devoted international readership.” Long-time fans of her stories will enjoy meeting old favourites, where their new setting in this book may reveal new sides to what once s...

Credited with sparking the current memoir explosion, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club spent more than a year at the top of the New York Times list. She followed with two other smash bestsellers: Cherry and Lit, which were critical hits as well.For thirty years Karr has also taught the form, winning teaching prizes at Syracuse. (The writing program there produced such acclaimed authors as Cheryl Strayed, Keith Gessen, and Koren Zailckas.) In The Art of Memo...

One of the greatest sports figures of all time at last breaks his silence in a memoir as unique as the man himself.Number 4. It is just about the most common number in hockey, but invoke that number and you can only be talking about one player -- the man often referred to as the greatest ever to play the game: Bobby Orr.From 1966 through the mid-70s he could change a game just by stepping on the ice. Orr could do things that others simply couldn’t, and while teammates and o...

✨ Step into the bustling, glittering world of 18th-century England with Evelina, Frances Burney's enchanting tale of love, society, and self-discovery . Follow the innocent and spirited Evelina as she navigates the trials of her first foray into London's high society. With sharp humor and poignant insight, Burney masterfully portrays Evelina's struggles to reconcile her humble upbringing with the complex, often absurd customs of the elite. Her encounters with charming suitors, scandal...