A List
5/9/11

New Edition Of SLU Prof's Book On Writer Alice Munro Published

CANTON - An updated and expanded edition of Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives, by St. Lawrence University Dana Professor of Canadian Studies Robert Thacker, has been published in paperback, and is available now in the United States. The original, published in 2005, was only available in Canada.

It is the only such volume that has received Munro's cooperation. Its publishers call it "the book about one of the world's great authors, which shows how her life and her stories intertwine."

Updated material in the new edition includes an additional chapter covering two books Munro has published since 2005 and information about her winning the Man Booker International Award in 2009, the third such award given.

Publishers Emblem Editions state, "For almost 30 years, Thacker has been researching this book, steeping himself in Munro's life and work, working with her cooperation to make it complete. The result is a feast of information for Alice Munro's admirers everywhere. By following 'the parallel tracks' of Munro's life and Munro's texts, he gives a thorough and revealing account of both her life and work."

A faculty member at St. Lawrence since 1983, Thacker is a graduate of Bowling Green State University. He earned a master's degree from the University of Waterloo - writing his thesis on Munro - and the Ph.D. from the University of Manitoba. He is an expert on Canadian culture, especially literature, and has written extensively on the work of Munro, Willa Cather, and the North American literary west.

Thacker is the editor of The Rest of the Story: Critical Essays on Alice Munro (1999). He received the 2003 Edith and Delbert Wylder Award from the Western Literature Association and is a former editor of The American Review of Canadian Studies. Thacker was awarded a grant from the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C., to support research on the Munro biography, as well as the Molson Fellowship, funded by a gift from Eric Molson, chairman of Molson Inc., and his wife, Jane Molson, of Montreal, through the Lincolnshire Foundation.

Widely regarded as among the best contemporary writers of short stories in English, Munro has published a novel, Lives of Girls and Women (1971), and the short-story collections Dance of the Happy Shades (1968); Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (1976); Who Do You Think You Are? (1978; U.S. and U.K., The Beggar Maid); The Moons of Jupiter (1982); The Progress of Love (1986); Friend of My Youth (1990); Open Secrets (1994); The Love of a Good Woman (1998); Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001); Vintage Munro (2004); and Runaway (2004). Since the 1970s, Munro's stories have been frequently printed in periodicals such as The Paris Review, Atlantic Monthly and, especially, The New Yorker, which has itself published well over 40 of them.

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