Alice Munro has written 14 collections of short stories and received 22 literary awards. By age 14 she knew she wanted to be a writer, and in 2013, at the age of 82, Alice became the first Canadian woman to win the Nobel Prize. Her stories are considered remarkable for revealing how she can place the “fantastic next to the ordinary” with each undercutting the other in ways that simply and effortlessly evoke life.

In these stories we discover a husband who can’t fathom his wife’s reaction to a possible murder-suicide next door; a piano teacher among whose developmentally disabled piano students is one who produces a recital performance that stuns its listeners; a woman living with a child-abusing taxidermist who believed “what was living with a man if it wasn’t about living inside his insanity?”

Join us to discover how Munro can take us through a story where we know the beginning and the end but without any clues as to how we got there.

Format: Participants will be expected to read one or two stories each week, to develop questions for and lead one discussion, individually or in pairs, and to participate actively each week. This is a Zoom videoconferencing class.

Required text: Vintage Munro: Selected Stories by Alice Munro (Vintage/Random House), 2010 is available for $14.18 from Amazon.