A good ways into the story, readers meet this proclamation: "You never quite knew how such things would turn out. You almost knew, but you could never be sure." It is perhaps as true about "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" as it is about Grant's predictions about his relationships
Unsurprisingly, a story named for a main character is going to be preoccupied with names and identity. It's also the first thing readers observe Queenie saying to Chrissy, when she arrives in Toronto and is met at Union Station. Her husband thinks it sounds like an animal's name, so Chrissy
It's inescapable, this sense of "What Is Remembered" being an alternate version of "Tricks". (If you want to avoid general spoilers, best not to click on that link, for you will intuit the sort of ending which that story has and thus the contrasting tone herein.) Once again, our narrator is reflecting upon
The details in "Post and Bean" matter. The specific itty-bitty matters of surprising consequence. Not necessarily what one sees at first glance, but what one uncovers, what the broader whole can be understood to mean. Take the group of people in the church office. At first, a stranger to the
Sometimes, when I begin reading an Alice Munro story, I am overwhelmed by a sense of "there it is". It's a feeling of immediate and undeniable recognition of familiar elements. Like the beginning of "Nettles", which begins with firmly rooting the reader in a time and place. It is summer.
