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  • Established Fiction
  • David Staines

On 14 November 2004, more than ten years ago, Jonathan Franzen reviewed Alice Munro’s Runaway, her tenth collection of short stories, in the New York Times. His review began: “Alice Munro has a strong claim to being the best fiction writer now working in North America, but outside of Canada, where her books are No. 1 best sellers, she has never had a large readership … I want to circle around Munro’s latest marvel of a book, ‘Runaway,’ by taking some guesses as to why her excellence so dismayingly exceeds her fame.”1

Two years later, Margaret Atwood opened her collection of Munro’s Selected Stories with the statement: “Alice Munro is among the major writers of English fiction of our time. She’s been accorded armfuls of super-superlatives by critics in both North America and the United Kingdom, she’s won many awards, and she has a devoted international readership. Among writers themselves, her name is spoken in hushed tones. Most recently she’s been used as a stick to flog the enemy with, in various inter-writerly combats. ‘You call this writing?’ the floggers say, in effect. ‘Alice Munro! Now that’s writing!’ She’s the kind of writer about whom it is often said – no matter how well-known she becomes – that she ought to be better known.”2

On 11 September 2013, the Guardian heralded Munro as one of the ten finest short fiction writers of all time. “Munro,” the article stated, “has changed our sense of what the short story can do as radically as Chekhov and Mansfield did at the beginning of the 20th century.”3

And then, on 13 October 2013, Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. “It is a challenge to find an unessential word or a superfluous phrase. Reading one of her texts is like watching a cat walk across a laid dinner table,” the Swedish Academy stated in its presentation speech. “A brief short story can often cover decades, summarizing a life, as she moves deftly between different periods. No wonder Alice Munro is often able to say more in thirty pages than an ordinary novelist is capable of in three hundred. She is a virtuoso of the elliptical and – as the Academy said in its brief prize citation – the master of the contemporary short story.”4 [End Page 25]

Although she published no book last year – her most recent collection, Dear Life, appeared the preceding year – her winning of the Nobel Prize was the most important literary event of 2013, bringing acclaim, as Munro herself states, to the short-story form, a particularly vibrant area of writing in Canadian fiction. The first Canadian-born and Canadianbased writer to be so honoured – although Saul Bellow was once a Canadian, he left Lachine, Quebec, at the age of nine to adopt Chicago as his home and the setting of his fiction – Munro is indeed a most worthy recipient of the Nobel Prize.

Among the many collections of short fiction published in 2013, a few stand out, and Douglas Glover’s Savage Love is pre-eminent. A collection of twenty-two stories, ranging in length from the sixty-two words of “Xo & Annabel. A Psychological Romance” to the more than forty pages of “Tristiana,” reminds the reader of Glover’s brilliant writing style. His sentences bristle with an infectious joie de vivre and a frequently comic inventiveness that drive forward to sometimes absurd conclusions.

In one robustly comic tale, “Shameless,” a tragic opening gives way to a surprisingly upbeat denouement. Megan Strehle, only eight years old, forms an unnatural and shaming passion for Tamas Preltz, a fifteen-year-old apprentice butcher; he is fired, and they go their separate ways. Later, Tamas and his wife, Laurette, are living in a vegan organic farming co-op, where they would often “make love in the field rows or behind a hay rick or beside an open window on moonlit nights, their cries of joy setting off mysterious vibrations in the listener, inspiring laughter, lust, and the desire for fat babies.” Then, long after Tamas is murdered, Megan returns, lamenting, “I have looked for him all my...

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