If this were the first Munro story that you read, by the time you reached the end of "1. Anonymous Letters", you might be shaking your head, for that segment seems to just stop. If you've been reading Munro stories for awhile, however, you'll be settling your chin in your
Rigoberta Menchú Tum is telling the stories of her Mayan girlhood in The Girl from Chimel. (So it turns out that you can discover a Nobel Peace Prize winner by reading a storybook, by dabbling in the backlist of a favourite indie press.) Although born into poverty in
Just as "Jesse and Meribeth" seems to be a story about MaryBeth but really reveals so much more about Jessie herself, "Eskimo" appears to be about all the people on the plane with Mary Jo, but it's really all about Mary Jo. Nonetheless, it begins with talk of the passengers
A dozen stories, nearly all about women and girls who are deaf, Louise Stern being the fourth generation of her own family to be born deaf. See all those dots on the cover? Sure, more than a dozen, so imagine them as characters, not stories. Then imagine that each of the
Friendships between schoolgirls like Jessie and MaryBeth -- for that is how their names are properly spelled, although they like to pretend to be Jesse and Meribeth -- are complicated. It's not the first time Alice Munro has grappled with the subject. The intricacies of relationships between schoolchildren also feature
