Alice Munro has died at the age of 92. For many years she has been a personal favorite, not just because her stories are intricate and complex and beautifully written but also because she has enriched my life and relationships by teaching me so much about others.
I first started reading her in The New Yorker, and I still remember when she announced she would be retiring . . . and then we got Too Much Happiness in 2009. After that, she again announced she was done . . . and then we got Dear Life in 2012. Sadly after that we didn’t get any more short stories from her, though I always hoped against hope that something would suddenly pop up in The New Yorker. We have covered almost all of her work on The Mookse and the Gripes, and I imagine when we’re done it will be time to start all over again.
For anyone interested in getting to know her work, I strongly recommend going with Lives of Girls and Women from 1971, though you really can’t go wrong.
If you’re interested, I have created a page dedicated to her work with easy access of the various posts on this site here.
Trevor,
Excellent post.
Larry B.
RIP Alice Munro. The best.
I admittedly was late to the party when it came to appreciating Munro, only having gotten around to her books in the last eight or nine years after having read “Child’s Play” in a writing workshop. To date I have read all but one collection (perhaps I’ll pull that one down from the shelf soon). A selfish part of me hopes there may be some unpublished material that will eventually see the light of day, but I suppose Munro likely wouldn’t want it so. RIP to a great.
I would like that too, David, but it sounds unlikely. That said, one of my favorite of her stories never made it into one of her main collections (might be in a collected stories somewhere by now). It’s “Axis,” which was originally published in the January 31, 2011 issue of The New Yorker. I’m not sure why this wasn’t in Dear Life. You won’t want to miss it :-)
In a Wikipedia list of Munro’s stories, I counted 17 that are not in her published collections. They appeared in various periodicals over the years, including about half 1950s, and half from 1970s to 2011 (the latest being in the New Yorker.) That sounds like a mighty interesting collection! And isn’t it likely there are others in manuscript that were never published at all?
These are the uncollected Munro stories listed on Wikipedia:
“A Basket of Strawberries” in Mayfair (November 1953)
“A Better Place Than Home” in Newcomers (1979)
“At the Other Place” in Canadian Forum 35 (September 1955), by Alice Laidlaw
“Axis” in The New Yorker, 31 January 2011
“Characters” in Ploughshares (U.S.) 4, no. 3 (1978),
“Connection” in Chatelaine 51 (November 1978)
“How Could I Do That?” in Chatelaine 28 (March 1956)
“Story for Sunday” in Folio 5, no. 1 (December 1950), by Alice Laidlaw
“The Dangerous One” in Chatelaine 29 (July 1957)
“The Dimensions of a Shadow” (by Alice Laidlaw) in Folio 4, no. 2 (April 1950)
“The Edge of Town” in Queen’s Quarterly 62, no. 3 (Autumn 1955)
The Ferguson Girls Must Never Marry” in Grand Street 1, no. 3 (Spring 1982)
“The Idyllic Summer” in Canadian Forum 34 (August 1954)
The Photographer” in Artist in Canadian Literature (1976)
“The Red Dress” in McCalls (March 1973)
“The Widower” in Folio 5, no. 2 (April 1951), by Alice Laidlaw
To Reach Japan” in Narrative Magazine, in Winter 2012
.”What is Real?” in The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, edited by R. V. Cassill and Richard Bausch, 6th edition, W W. Norton, New York, 2000
18 of them. I miscounted before.
Thanks, Eddie! That’s a great resource! Some of them have been published, I believe, but under slightly different names. I’m sure some of these were modified from their original form, but much of her later work varies from what was published in The New Yorker. Here are the ones I think did find their way into her collections:
-“Connection”: ““Chaddeleys and Flemings I: Connection” in The Moons of Jupiter
-“The Photographer”: “Epilogue: The Photographer” in Lives of Girls and Women
-“The Red Dress”: “The Red Dress — 1946” in Dance of the Happy Shades
-“To Reach Japan”: same title in Dear Life
-“What Is Real?” I had not seen before, but I have now read it and it is a wonderful short introduction to that topic in Munro’s own work. It’s not a short story, but then again some of her stories, particularly in The View from Castle Rock and Dear Life, are in a similar vein.
I’m surprised by a couple that I thought would be “published previously, in slightly different form” but don’t appear to have been.
-“Characters,” in Ploughshares (you can read it here), seems at first quite familiar, dealing as it does with Flo, one of the main characters in The Beggar Maid aka Who Do You Think You Are?, yet it doesn’t appear to be even a snippet of one of those stories, and it is not brought up in the early pages of the book where it lists where pieces were previously published.
-I also thought “The Ferguson Girls Must Never Marry” might be in The Moons of Jupiter or The Progress of Love, but again nothing I can see contradicts that it was never collected.
Those are the two I’m most interested in, as well, since they are from such a rich period of her writing! I may see if I can also track down the uncollected stories from the 1950s, but that isn’t as urgent for me.
“A Better Place than Home” looks intriguing. It was published in a collection of stories and not another magazine. You can buy a copy here for $50 that has Munro’s autograph next to her story apparently! I admit I put this in the cart and almost snatched it up, but I’m saving for something else so I backed off. Phew!
Thanks so much for putting this together, Eddie! It’s been fun to go through my books and search online a bit this morning! I’m excited for these!
I should have checked the collections. The Wiki list usually said what one they were in, so I took for granted it wasn’t in one if it didn’t say so.
Still, that leaves quite a few, enough for a book. A volume of just early ones would be interesting, especially if there are others not on the Wiki list.
Trevor: I finally noticed where you mentioned that _Who Do You Think You Are?_ was also issued as _The Beggar Maid_ .
Just after Munro’s death, I decided to order the three of her collections I didn’t have on eBay. Whatever list I used didn’t mention that fact. I had the latter and ordered the former….
What I got was a 2006 softback reissue of the former with a tasteless cover photo which makes it look like it might be a sleazy sex oriented book. What’s with that? The plus is a new (brief) introduction, for what it’s worth.
It is good I already had most of the collections, half hardcover, which I prefer. I’m normally a thrift buyer. The inflation of used book prices usually puts older, better editions out of that market and out of range for me. I bought softback reissues, none of which I much like.
Never mind. The bright side is I now have all the collections!