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“... Queenie said,​ ‘Maybe you better stop calling me that,’ and I said, ‘What?’ ‘Stan doesn’t like it,’ she said. ‘Queenie.’ It was a worse surprise to me to hear her say ‘Stan’ than to have her tell me to call her by her right name, which was Lena. But I could hardly expect her to go on calling him Mr Vorguilla, now that they were married, and had been for nearly two years ...”

“... There’s something confusing about the consensus around Alice Munro. It has to do with the way her critics begin by asserting her goodness, her greatness, her majorness or her bestness, and then quickly adopt a defensive tone, instructing us in ways of seeing as virtues the many things about her writing that might be considered shortcomings ...”

“... The Canadian writer Alice Munro once likened a good short story to a commodious house whose every room possesses an exterior door. So accommodating a house, she wrote, is capable of admitting visitors through any number of openings, just as a story can be entered by way of its separate sections or paragraphs or even its individual sentences or words ...”

“... it through them. In this category are Tolstoy, Chekhov; and in our age the late V.S. Pritchett and Alice Munro. Alice Munro is such a good writer that nobody bothers anymore to judge her goodness, as people long ago stopped judging Pritchett’s – her reputation is like a good address. She is surely Pritchett’s ...”

“... Alice Munro doesn’t write much about her writing: there are only a few interviews, hardly any essays or journalistic pieces, and we don’t catch her holding forth about her literary likes and dislikes. But here in her new collection, The View from Castle Rock, she speaks to us directly, first in a brief introduction explaining the way the book has been put together, and then in a piece, ‘No Advantages’, in which she describes in her own person the researches into her family history that have resulted in some of the stories that follow ...”

“... of rural sameness. At one intersection is the tiny town of Wingham (population c.2952), where Alice Munro was born in 1931, and twenty miles to the south, another tiny town: Clinton (population c.3240), where Munro has lived for the past thirty years with her second husband. ...”

“... It was love she sickened at,’ Alice Munro wrote in The Beggar Maid. ‘It was the enslavement, the self-abasement, the self-deception.’ If that’s her attitude it doesn’t promise much romance for her latest collection, despite its title; and in fact the book describes not so much love as the subtle changes in loyalty and disposition of which sexual love is only one (and not the most important) example ...”

“... particularly interesting to men who want to know what women think of them and know about them. Alice Munro is a 56-year-old Canadian who has been married twice: she is particularly concerned with the knowingness derived from broken relationships. One of the 11 skilful stories in this book (her sixth collection) is called ‘Lichen’ – a fungoid ...”

“... without, in fact, displaying the rather tired characteristics of womanliness, is provided by Alice Munro in The Moons of Jupiter. In this excellent collection of stories, Alice Munro is treading on the heels of her compatriot, Margaret Atwood. Events are less powerful in ...”

“... vein), I spoke eagerly to him of my new admiration for the stories of our Canadian contemporary Alice Munro – only to learn that he already shared it. I felt as if I was sitting at his feet. There can’t have been many Oxford and Cambridge dons who might have said the same at that point. Another surprise involved another female writer. When he was ...”

“... Yates’s reissued Revolutionary Road, a whole novel about a married couple arguing. What about Alice Munro? Could she attract them, truthful, small-scale and brilliant as she is? Or would they not have it, the clear reflection of the quotidian, the visceral, redeeming pain of recognition? As I wrote my novel I thought of them: I wanted to woo them and ...”

“... have to prime the fiction lists for books like these. Other star performers are the stories of Alice Munro and the authorised translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Non-fiction lists are usually populated by textbooks and get-rich-quick titles. There is also a mountain of health guides. Study, wealth and longevity: these are the three cardinal ...”

“... without motive, an intruder that disrupts domestic tranquillity or workplace banality; leave it to Alice Munro, Lorrie Moore or Joshua Ferris. The disease is out of place in Saunders’s skewed world. His stories are more satisfying when his characters’ good intentions bring about their undoing. Something of the sort happens in ‘Escape from ...”

“... in an abstract way – the draped dishevelled big bed, prodigal dressing table, strewn sofa …’ Alice Munro is at the plain end of the spectrum of style. ‘Maury was in the front bedroom looking for his swimming trunks, though everybody had told him that the water would be too cold for swimming. He said the store would not be open.’ The facts ...”

“... resisting her assimilation into writing, whereas everything is fuel for Bellow’s virtuosity. Alice Munro – more or less her contemporary – might have been a more useful model for Howland. Munro makes her style and form out of her authorial hesitation, incorporating into her sentences her doubt over her right ...”