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...

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...

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...

Alice Munro turns to her family for inspiration; and what follows is a fictionalised, brilliantly imagined version of the past.‘One of my very favourite writers’ Claire TomalinFrom her ancestors' view from Edinburgh's Castle Rock in the eighteenth century to her parents' thwarted ambitions in Ontario, and her own awakening in 1950s Canada, Munro effortlessly weaves fact and myth to create an epic story of past and present, proving that fict...

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...

Hemingway’s Enduring ClassicWritten when he was only only thirty years old, Ernest Hemingway’s classic novel of love during a time of war was heralded as the best American novel to emerge from World War I.This semiautobiographical tale features an American ambulance driver, Lieutenant Frederic Henry, stationed on the Italian front, who falls in love with Catherine Barkley, a beautiful English nurse. Set against the horrors of war on the battlefield, with ti...

THE INSTANT NUMBER ONE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER'Wise, authentic and brave' - Psychologies'Brimming with positive ways in which to think about creative living' - Mail on Sunday'Consider her your own personal life coach' - Marie Claire'I have profoundly changed my approach to creating since I read this book' - Huffington PostRe...

The Sun Also Rises is a 1926 novel by American writer Ernest Hemingway, his first, that portrays American and British expatriates who travel along the Camino de Santiago from Paris to the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona and watch the running of the bulls and the bullfights. An early modernist novel, it received mixed reviews upon publication. Hemingway biographer Jeffrey Meyers writes that it is now "recognized as Hemingway's greatest work" and Hemingway scholar Linda Wagner-Martin call...