This rich volume begins with a major new essay by renowned short story critic and theorist Charles E. May, “Returning to the Source: Alice Munro, Flannery O'Connor, and Eudora Welty,” followed by a major new essay by one of Munro's most long-standing and most perceptive readers, Catherine Sheldrick Ross, identifying and examining the major concerns which Munro has revisited so compellingly for the duration of her astonishing career. Overall, the twenty contributions to Alice Munro Everlasting take an ardently literary approach, with each essay focussing -- uniquely amongst studies of any short story writer -- on the last stories in Munro's fourteen volumes from Dance of the Happy Shades to Dear Life. Collectively, the many different contributions to Alice Munro Country and Alice Munro Everlasting offer a new model for the art of the critical essay -- combining imagination and analysis, personal testimony and scholarship. They are intended equally to honour the genius of Alice Munro and to give enjoyment to all interested readers. And as one excited advance reader remarked, “I imagine that these two books will form the core of Alice Munro studies in the future.”

Highly respected nationally and internationally by scholars and creative writers for his work as a small press publisher, editor, literary critic, interviewer, and bibliographer, J.R. (Tim) Struthers has edited some twenty-five volumes of theory, critical essays, autobiography, fiction, and poetry -- including works in honour of or by such important Canadian writers as Clark Blaise, George Elliott, Jack Hodgins, Hugh Hood, John Metcalf, Alice Munro, and James Reaney. Tim is the author of the first two scholarly articles, world-wide, on Alice Munro and has been described by W.J. Keith, FRSC, as “probably the best literary interviewer in Canada.” Together with John Metcalf, he coedited Clark Blaise's Selected Essays. Still a very enthusiastic teacher of English, Tim has now devoted more than thirty years of full-time service to the University of Guelph. He lives in Guelph with his bride of forty years, poet and scholar Marianne Micros.

J.R. (Tim) Struthers' profile page

The two volumes thus form a compendium of essays on important, well-established critical paths into Munro’s work—on place, on ending—making existing articles available in book form and offering fresh ones on these topics, with many truly enlightening contributions.

Canadian Literature: A Quarterly Criticism and Review