In Alice Munro's first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, readers meet Alva in "Sunday Afternoon". Alva is the hired girl for the Gannetts, who expect that she will dutifully perform in their home and, then, travel with them later in the summer to their parents' island in Georgian Bay.
Whether and how a girl rode a bicycle mattered a great deal in the 1950s in southwestern Ontario, for the young Alice Munro. 2006; Vintage, 2007 "We lived just beyond the town limits, so if I showed up riding a bicycle—and particularly this bicycle—it would put me in
For readers familiar with Alice Munro's most recent collection, Dear Life, the title of this story will immediately recall "Night", which she described as being "not quite" a story about her relationship with her father. Vintage, 2006 "Night" is part of a group of four tales, which she feels are
Oh, the overwhelming allure. Past Orange Prize nominees So many of us have seemingly endless older books on our TBRs. Sometimes these are tightly defined (spreadsheeted phenomena, like this Virago project of mine) whereas others are loosely conceived ("I'm going to read more Victorian potboilers"). But, despite this, more recently published
Many of the themes which resurface in Alice Munro's fiction play an important role in "Working for a Living". 2006; Vintage, 2008 One of the first which strikes readers is the question of town versus country, which plays such a predominant role in both Lives of Girls and
