This collection of essays is edited and introduced by Alice Munro's biographer, recognized as one of the most prestigious and extensively published scholars of the Canadian writer's fiction. Most of the nine contributing authors have written before on Munro, and all bar one are North American academics. It might, perhaps, have been a stronger collection with more substantial representation from Munro critics based outside North America, some of whom, however, are cited in chapter notes and in the general index.

The book is well structured, in compliance with the conventions of the Bloomsbury series: the studies consist of three parts, each containing original essays on three recent works by the writer. The volume's editor introduces and contextualizes all the sections. The series editor declares her commitment to the principle “that all studies are written in a style that will be engaging and clear however complex the subject” (x), and this principle is generally observed throughout the book, a laudable accomplishment in view of Thacker's admission that Munro's “stories are daunting in their complexities” (245).

In the first essay on Hateship, the focus of Part One, Charles E. May discusses five stories in his densely allusive argument that the novel and the short story are distinctive genres. While the former can “expand to better create an illusion of everyday reality,” the latter relies more on “artifice, pattern, structure, language and significance” (42). May concludes that even while Munro's stories appear to present ordinary lives – what he calls “recognizable stuff” – they are exploring “the subterranean mysteries of human desire” (43). Concentrating on the story “Comfort,” Tracy Ware, in the second essay of Part One, draws on historical and contemporary studies in education to address a subject attracting scant attention from Munro scholars: her depiction of teachers. He confesses that his research has “made [him] more sympathetic to teachers in and out of Munro” (63). The third essay on Hateship, one of the best pieces in the book, is Robert McGill's perspicacious analysis of “The Bear Came over the Mountain,” which he regards as “the representative Munro text” (65, original emphasis). He argues that in tracing the female protagonist's cognitive impairment, Munro also seeks to expose the male character's limitations, which are the result of inadvertence, insensitivity and his flawed expectations of gender role.

In a diligently researched study of three stories in Runaway known as the “Juliet Triptych,” Julie Rivkin, stressing an “omnipresent intertextuality with classical texts” in Munro's stories, discusses the importance of “fate, chance, determinism and coincidence” (91) in the light of the main character's engagement with the Classics, specifically her fondness for Greek myths, and their revelations of cosmic justice. In the second essay on Runaway, Eric Reeves opines that all the stories therein are explorations of the workings of fate. He argues that Munro's skilful use of what he collectively terms her “narrative inflections” (130) serves to make salient the various intersections of fate and character in her fictive worlds. Lester E. Barber regards the stories in Runaway as largely expressive of Munro's “comic worldview” and he works hard to persuade: he considers various confusions, twists of fate, acts of mischief, “threats to life and even evil” (138) that characters encounter, arguing that a comic worldview ultimately expresses faith that these can be overcome.

In the first piece on Dear Life, J. R. (Tim) Struthers arranges his argument under four subtopics – autobiography, metafiction, metaphor and allegory. Throughout, he highlights the importance of journey and exploration in Munro's fiction, choosing for the bedrock of his argument “To Reach Japan,” where he believes that Munro “redefine[s] the possibilities of the genre of autobiography” (181). In a purposeful, cogently argued essay, Ailsa Cox turns her attention to the subject of “grotesque humor” in the collection, using Bakhtinian theory in her discussion of “display, performance and spectacle” (186) in several stories. Linda M. Morra's thoughtful essay on the “dynamics of intimacy” in the autobiographical finale of Dear Life is a fitting conclusion to the section, celebrating as it does how Munro implies that intimacy and compassion are “pivotal to the shaping of identities and relationships” (203, 216) in real and fictive lives.

This accessible book is a welcome treasure for readers and students of Munro's fiction; its erudition ensures that it will be eagerly sought out by scholars working in the field. The highlight of the collection, for me, is the wonderful introduction, where Robert Thacker pays homage to Munro's talent for making every story, particularly in her latest work, “a gathering of autobiography, of biography, and of imagination, each one a narrative rendering of imagined possibility” (18).