What in terms of Alice Munro’s creative artistry and creative power allowed her to become the first and only short story writer, the first and only Canadian, and just the thirteenth woman in history to win the Nobel Prize in Literature? And exactly when during Munro’s career did her artistry and power advance to ensure that she would earn such world-wide renown? The answers lie in studying the boldly innovative yet greatly under-examined group of her four mid-career breakthrough books.　Our volume therefore provides a carefully orchestrated analysis of Munro’s subtle yet potent handling of form, technique and style both within individual stories and across these special collections. Reading Alice Munro’s Breakthrough Books: A Suite in Four Voices not only addresses a significant vacancy in Munro criticism – and, by extension, in all short story criticism – but, equally importantly, offers an exciting new model for how criticism can be collectively written.

"The four co-authors of Reading Alice Munro’s Breakthrough Books: A Suite in Four Voices [...] have all been reading Munro for several decades and keep coming back to her short fiction, finding more to it with each re-reading. As a quartet, the image of the musical suite in the subtitle points at a combination of diversity and complementariness among them, in a composition meant to reveal and educate." - Journal of the Short Story in English