Hello, Muse Readers!
The literary world lost a legendary short story writer a month ago—Nobel Prize winner, Alice Munro, died at age 92 on May 13th. Munro was born in 1931 to a family of chicken farmers in rural Ontario, Canada. Her short stories are rooted in her experiences of country living and being in the wilderness. Some critics have complained that Munro’s stories are too “ordinary” and “banal,” but an article, written in 2003 in The Guardian, captures the true essence of Munro’s work:
She writes of turkey gutting and fox farming, of trees felled in the Ontario wilderness, of harsh country schools and lingering illnesses, of familiar violence and obscure shame, and above all, of the lives of girls and women. And while these things have perhaps made her less well known than she should be, and the predictable sods have been flung — that her concerns are domestic, narrow, regional, dated, that she only writes short stories — hers is a story of triumph over such petty assumptions.