There is nothing exotic or off-putting in the opening paragraph or two of an Alice Munro story. The author puts her hand on your shoulder and invites you into her fictional world. She is friendly, and there is a neighborly quality to her...
Alice Munro grew up in an era in which women were expected to be mothers, teachers, or nurses. You wouldn’t have concluded that you were going to be a writer. But sometimes necessity creates these talents. The Canadian market is a fraction...
I opened my own literary agency in 1974, and Alice became my client in 1976—after her third book, Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You. At that time, her writing was relatively new to the US market, and I was still developing my network...
There was a time when I thought the Serbs would never get rid of Miloševic. Dictators give the impression of permanence. They convince themselves and the rest of us that they are going to be around forever. “Long live,” their enthusiastic...
At the Bulgaria-Serbia border, when the train sighed to a halt between high prisonlike fences with crooked chicken wire running on top, our compartment received two official visits—first from Bulgarian customs officers and later on, a few...
Sundays on the Phone, by Mark Rudman. Wesleyan, November 2005. $22.95
Since 1994 when he published Rider, Mark Rudman has been writing poems that have become something like one long poem, a meditation on an American life, his own. These...
