Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

years, had not yet been worked out. They hoped to hold off that paperback so as to get a second Christmas season for Munro’s book, so the publication of the Vintage edition in the United States before then was a problem. McClelland & Stewart took the steps necessary to keep copies of the Vintage edition out of Canada, avoiding what is called a “buy around,” whereby Canadian bookstores damage the sales of a Canadian hardcover by smuggling in a foreign (usually U.S.) paperback edition of the same book despite the fact that it is not licensed for sale in Canada.
    Munro’s forthcoming introduction for the Vintage paperback offered an opportunity because, as Gibson wrote in the same memorandum, they could use it for marketing the
Selected Stories
, “perhaps as an eight-page handout for stores to give away with the book.” As he had expected, the book had done well enough in Canada but, owing to Munro’s longer history of reputation there, its sales were not overwhelming; by the end of 1997 the publisher still had almost 10,000 of its original 25,440 print run on hand. In view of these circumstances, they took two steps. First, in their negotiations with Penguin Canada over the subsidiary rights, McClelland & Stewart insisted that the Canadian paperback edition would not be shipped to stores beforeJanuary 1, 1998, ensuring a second Christmas sale of the hardcover
Selected Stories
. Second, they decided to offer a nine-dollar rebate on the book from December 10 to January 2 and, in concert with this, Gibson set about producing “Alice Munro: A Tribute,” a “sixteen-page pre-Christmas ‘Tribute’ to accompany
Selected Stories
as a free hand-out.”
    Gibson had 5,000 copies of the tribute printed. It contained Munro’s Vintage introduction, retitled “About This Book” and signed by Munro, Gibson’s “Alice Munro’s
Selected Stories
– A Publisher’s View,” a biographical note, selections of reviews of
Selected Stories
in three sections (Britain, the United States, Canada), an excerpt from a Gzowski interview, and a “Garland of Praise for Alice Munro’s Previous Work.” When Gibson sent Munro copies of the tribute, he explained that the “plan is [that booksellers] will display them on the counters and give them to local book clubs – and that everyone who has not yet bought the
Selected Stories
(which includes quite a fair share of Canada’s population) will feel ashamed of themselves and rush out and buy the book.” Quite clearly a publisher making a case to his author about sales efforts (“So we are doing all we can,” he writes), Gibson also reminds her (and Barber too, since she got a copy) that McClelland & Stewart was “right to be concerned … that the book would do better in the U.S. and the U.K., since your Canadian followers were so loyal that most of them already had all of your work.”
    Gibson also comments here that he would be unable to attend the upcoming award ceremony in Washington but that Avie Bennett would be there to represent McClelland & Stewart at the major event where Munro was the first non-American to receive the PEN -Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. This prize had already been given to Saul Bellow, Joyce Carol Oates, and John Updike, among others, in each case celebrating a body of work. The PEN -Malamud was presented to Munro in Washington at the Folger Shakespeare Library on December 12, where she also read. Speaking at the presentation ceremony, Canadian broadcaster Robert MacNeil offered this evaluation:
    Her stories
feel
like novels. You come away knowing as much about her people as you might in a novel, more than manynovels, after just twenty-five pages.… Her observation of human nature, first practiced so tellingly on her home ground, but refined over four decades, has reached levels of universal application, in which understanding of the human heart is more important than any geographical peculiarities.
    As such an award and such public assessments suggest, Munro’s work continued to attract even more adulation. At home, she had opted not to enter the
Selected Stories
for consideration for the Governor General’s Award just as, by serving on its first selection committee, she had avoided the first Giller for
Open Secrets
, to Gibson’s dismay. But that book received the W.H. Smith Award in Britain as the best book of the year and, in Washington, the P EN -Malamud came for the whole of her work. As the 1990s passed, such foreign