Word: munro
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Chairman and Chief Executive Officer: J. Richard Munro...
...fifth collection of short stories, Alice Munro, 55, continues to buck the genre's fashionable trend toward miniaturization and microplots. Her characters stubbornly refuse to trudge like zombies through brief but nonetheless tedious interludes. They do not act like literary artifacts or wan verbal gestures toward ennui. They behave, instead, as if they had all the time and space imaginable to lead and ponder their complicated lives. Each of the eleven pieces in The Progress of Love seems to contain enough material for a fair-sized novel; Munro's art of compression emphasizes amplitudes rather than economies...
...Munro also creates the illusion of leisure by playing tricks with time. She introduces stories at the point where other writers might finish them, then uses flashbacks to build up remarkable suspense about the disposition of foregone conclusions. Fits starts off matter-of-factly: "The two people who died were in their early sixties." There has been, it turns out, a particularly gory murder-suicide in a small town. Nobody knows what drove this couple to such a fate. Speculation flourishes: "A division of opinion became evident between men and women. It was nearly always the men who believed...
Sometimes The Progress of Love seems an ironic title. Munro describes the kinds of erosion that can occur when two people have rubbed against each other too long: "They were intimate. They had found out so much about each other that everything had got cancelled out by something else. That was why the sex between them could seem so shamefaced, merely and drearily lustful, like sex between siblings." A wife reaches for kind thoughts about her husband and almost succeeds: "I would think how humble he was, really, taking on such a ready-made role of husband, father, breadwinner...
HENRY R. LUCE 1898-1967 EDITOR- IN- CHIEF: HENRY ANATOLE GRUNWALD CHAIRMAN AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER: J. RICHARD MUNRO PRESIDENT AND CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER: N. J. NICHOLAS JR. CHAIRMAN OF THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE: RALPH P. DAVIDSON CORPORATE EDITOR: RAY CAVE...