This rich volume begins with a major new essay by renowned short story critic and theorist Charles E. May, Returning to the Source: Alice Munro, Flannery O'Connor, and Eudora Welty, followed by a major new essay by one of Munro’s most long-standing and most perceptive readers, Catherine Sheldrick Ross, identifying and examining the major concerns which Munro has revisited so compellingly for the duration of her astonishing career. Overall, the twenty contributions to Alice Munro Everlasting take an ardently literary approach, with each essay focussing – uniquely amongst studies of any short story writer – on the last stories in Munro’s fourteen volumes from Dance of the Happy Shades to Dear Life. Collectively, the many different contributions to Alice Munro Country and Alice Munro Everlasting offer a new model for the art of the critical essay – combining imagination and analysis, personal testimony and scholarship. They are intended equally to honour the genius of Alice Munro and to give enjoyment to all interested readers. And as one excited advance reader remarked, I imagine that these two books will form the core of Alice Munro studies in the future.