jueves, 16 de mayo de 2024

"Dear Life", by Alice Munro (1931- 2024)

Alice Munro, the short-story writer and the winner of the 2013 Nobel prize has died aged 92, you can read her obituary and listen to a compilation of interview clips on "Alice Munro, Canadian author who mastered the short story, dead at 92", written by Rhianna Schmunk for Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Alice Munro was a small town girl, a mother of three girls, a bookshop owner and a writer in her free time, until her literary success took up most of her time in her mid-forties and eventually was hailed as "a master of the short story" by the judges of the Nobel prize for Literature. Three of her short stories, Chance, Soon and Silence, from her book Runaway, were made into Almodovar's film "Julieta". 

Her stories are often set in Huron County, in rural Ontario, they deal about human existence, moral conflict and revelation and they can be a first step for C1 learners to start reading authentic, unabridged fiction. Here you can find her memoir, "Dear Life. A Childhood Visitation", with a reading comprehension task & its key for C1 learners, who will find descriptive words and collocations like: to pull off, rickety, a mill race, contempt, unsoiled, a Highland fling, clicking [shoes], to dig [dug, dug], a well, to drill, to honk, to summon, shuddering, a crinkly [smile], a [drinking] pail, a trapline, an [animal] pen, a hayfield, to cull [animals], manure, to tell on [somebody], jolly, to dawn on [somebody], to dwindle, downsloping,a cedar [tree], troll, a miscarriage, a flurry, a dumbwaiter, hemstitching, to pelt [the foxes], a downturn, molten [metal], a [metal] mold, to buckle down to [something], to cram [my head with knowledge], a quavery [voice], a hatchet, to wring [clothes], a misgiving, to keep tabs on [somebody/ something], to grab, to tilt, clatter, a haphazard [way], to wedge, to bang, to rattle, distraught, to stare, a [wild] grin, a [river] flat, to muddy [up], to commend [Nature], to whale [the unkindness] out of [me], to beat the tar out of [me], to dispose of [a house], for dear life, to spot [somebody].

Alice Munro published several of her short stories in The New Yorker. For further background into her life you can read the interview she gave to The New Yorker when she published her last book "Dear Life" in 2012: "On 'Dear Life': An Interview with Alice Munro". 

Apart from the above-mentioned interview videos in her CBC obituary, "Alice Munro, Canadian author who mastered the short story, dead at 92", you can watch below the conversation she had with Kyle Lanningham right after she received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013. This interview with subtitles is also accessible to C1 students.