Category: Alice Munro
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The Gen X Career Meltdown and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl
Gillian Flynn has been keeping busy with various projects, but there’s little news about her recent creative output. Perhaps it’s difficult to embark on a new book when you’ve had a novel go supernova, like Gone Girl did in 2012? A bestseller adapted to film. A cultural touchstone. The origin of one of the most…
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“The Beating of a Child Was By No Means Reprehensible”: Alice Munro, Freud, and the Long Aftermath of Crimes Against Children
A question from a student about Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are? (the question being whether it’s autobiographical) sent me back to her terrifying story “Royal Beatings” this morning. Then an interview that I read recently had me searching for Freud’s “A Child Is Being Beaten.” This will become a longer critical piece. Just…
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On Learning Greek: From Classical Mysteries to Alice Munro’s “Silence”
This will be my fourth and, for now, final foray into the academic mystery novel, and here I will be considering Donna Tartt’s unexpected blockbuster The Secret History; an odd curiosity found in a second-hand book store, Carol Clemeau’s The Ariadne Clue; the recent fiction of Alex Michaelides, including The Maidens; and to end on…
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A Snow Day, a Sick Day, and Margaret Atwood’s “The Stone Mattress”
For my ENGL 262 students. See you after Reading Week! And apologies for the inconvenience. Margaret Atwood, Murder Mysteries, and “The Stone Mattress” My introduction to Margaret Atwood was Life Before Man, an austere and emotionally chilly novel from 1979, which made me fall in love with the Royal Ontario Museum before I’d ever set…
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Alice Munro, Again: “Fiction”
But first, for something completely different. Readers may have noticed that there is a decided lack of ethnocultural/racial diversity among the authors I’m considering in this project. It’s a challenge in the field of crime fiction in Canada and it leads to, for instance, Pamela Bedore’s excellent book devoting a chapter to Ausma Zehanat Khan’s…
The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction 