“Books seem to me to be magic, and I wanted to be part of the magic.” -- Alice Munro

Alice Munro in 2009, the year she won the Man Booker International Prize. (Associated Press)
Alice Ann Munro, the Canadian short story writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013, died Monday at her home in Port Hope, Ontario, at the age of 92. The news was confirmed by her publisher, Penguin Random House Canada.
Munro's work has been described as revolutionizing the architecture of the short story, especially in its tendency to move forward and backward in time, and with integrated short fiction cycles.
Munro published 14 short story collections, as well as the novel Lives of Girls and Women, and was a regular contributor in literary magazines such as The New Yorker and Tamarack Review. Her first story collection, Dance of the Happy Shades won Canada's prestigious Governor's General's Award.

In 2013, Munro was selected as Nobel Laureate in Literature for her body of work spanning seven decades. The Nobel Committee described Munro as a “master of the contemporary short story,” whose writing captured “the feeling of just being a human being.”
"Disliking Munro, as a writer or as a person, seemed almost heretical," wrote Hillel Italie for the Associated Press. "The wide and welcoming smile captured in her author photographs was complemented by a down-to-earth manner and eyes of acute alertness, fitting for a woman who seemed to pull stories out of the air the way songwriters discovered melodies. She was admired without apparent envy, placed by the likes of Jonathan Franzen, John Updike and Cynthia Ozick at the very top of the pantheon.
Munro’s daughter, Sheila Munro, wrote the 2001 memoir Lives of Mothers and Daughters: Growing Up With Alice Munro” in which she confided that 'so unassailable is the truth of her fiction that sometimes I even feel as though I’m living inside an Alice Munro story.'
'Back in the 1950s and 60s, when Munro began, there was a feeling that not only female writers but Canadians were thought to be both trespassing and transgressing,' Margaret Atwood wrote in a 2013 tribute published in the Guardian after Munro won the Nobel. 'The road to the Nobel wasn’t an easy one for Munro: the odds that a literary star would emerge from her time and place would once have been zero.'"
Remembrances
Joyce Carol Oates: Munro's stories “have the density — moral, emotional, sometimes historical — of other writers’ novels.”
Richard Ford: “With Alice it’s like a shorthand. You’ll just mention her, and everybody just kind of generally nods that she’s just sort of as good as it gets.”
Margaret Atwood: “Few writers have explored such processes more thoroughly, and more ruthlessly [than Munro]. Hands, chairs, glances – all are part of an intricate inner map strewn with barbed wire and booby traps, and secret paths through the shrubbery.”
Jonathan Franzen: “[Munro] is one of the handful of writers, some living, most dead, whom I have in mind when I say that fiction is my religion.”
Canadian novelist Heather O’Neill: “Devastated to her about Alice Munro’s passing. Last month I reread all of Alice Munro’s books. I felt the need to be close to her. Every time I read her is a new experience. Every time changes me. She will live forever.”
NPR critic Alan Cheuse: "Munro focuses on every aspect of our ordinary existence and makes it seem as extraordinary as it actually is."
The Nobel Prize video interview
While Munro was unable to attend the prize ceremony in Stockholm in 2013, she recorded a video interview for the event. “I want my stories to move people,” Munro said in her Nobel Lecture in absentia, “everything the story tells moves the (reader) in such a way that you feel you are a different person when you finish.”
An appreciation
The Essential Alice Munro: The only prerequisite for reading the Nobel laureate, a master of short stories, is: having lived. Here’s where to start.
By Ben Dolnick, published Jan. 24, 2024, New York Times
Before I’d read Alice Munro — when my knowledge of her amounted to an oafish word cloud (“older woman,” “Canadian,” “short stories”) — I imagined that the experience of reading her books, if I ever bothered to, would be like listening to classical music on fancy headphones in a college library: civilized, subtle, probably sleep-inducing.
But then I actually read Munro, and she lifted off my headphones in order to whisper an insane, unforgettable piece of gossip about that anxiety-stricken T.A. over by the copy machine. It turns out that Alice Munro — Nobel laureate, Author Most Likely to Endure, object of universal writerly reverence and envy — is not just important, but fun. Her books don’t belong on a high shelf; they belong in the passenger seat of your car, in the tote bag you bring to the grocery store. She writes about penises that look “blunt and stupid, compared, say, to fingers and toes with their intelligent expressiveness”; old people who smell like rank flower water; the way that couples breaking up occasionally interrupt the solemn proceedings to have passionate sex. Read more
Update: Published in TIME magazine on July 8, 2024:
"In a heart-wrenching essay by Andrea Robin Skinner, Munro’s youngest daughter who is now 58 years old— published on Sunday in the Toronto Star alongside a reported companion piece by the paper — Skinner reveals that she was sexually abused by her stepfather, Munro’s second husband Gerald Fremlin, since she was 9, and that when she informed Munro of the abuse years later, the celebrated writer turned a blind eye and stood by her daughter’s abuser." Read more in TIME magazine.
"How the literary world is reacting to the revelations by Alice Munro’s daughter," Toronto Star, July 8, 2024
More reading
In celebration of her life and work, The Paris Review we’ve unlocked two stories by Alice Munro: “Spaceships Have Landed” and “Circle of Prayer.” https://www.theparisreview.org/authors/3039/alice-munro
Canadian writer and Nobel prize winner Alice Munro dies at 92, BBC, Tuesday, May 14, 2024
Alice Munro, Nobel winner and titan of the short story, dies aged 92, The Guardian, Tuesday, May 14, 2024
What Alice Munro Has Left Us: A reflection on the death at 92 of the Nobel Prize–winning master of the short story, The Atlantic, Tuesday, May 14, 2024
Author Alice Munro's death 'bittersweet' at Victoria bookstore that carries her name, The Canadian Press, Wednesday, May 14, 2024
Our Favorite Quotes From Alice Munro, the Master of the Short Story, Esquire, Wednesday, May 14, 2024
Alice Munro: Five Classic Short Stories, Barron's, Tuesday, May 14, 2024
Alice Munro Reinvigorated the Short Story, The New Yorker, Tuesday, May 14, 2024
No One Wrote About Sex Like Alice Munro, Vulture, Wednesday, May 14, 2024
The making of the Alice Munro Library ‘From abandoned building to heritage library’, The Hamilton Spectator, Friday, April 19, 2024
Alice Munro: Our Chekhov, The New Yorker, October 10, 2013
Alice Munro: an appreciation by Margaret Atwood, October 10, 2008
Bringing Life to Life: A conversation with Alice Munro, whose stories are fueled by her fascination with the way people portray their own lives, The Atlantic, December 1, 2001
Alice Munro, The Art of Fiction No. 137, The Paris Review, Summer 1994
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