When Canadian Alice Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013, she had already declared her resignation from the post of short story writer following the publication of her 2012 collection Dear Life. This present volume offers critical analyses of Alice Munro's complete final short story collection. The book's contributors exercise in-depth, close readings of each individual story and situate them in Munro's lifetime oeuvre, as well as in her work's critical reception to date. Scholars set out to show how complex, irritating, disturbing, and enchanting Munro's stories are, and how often all that matters is to hold life dear - or to hold on for (dear) life. (Series: MasteRResearch - Vol. 7) Subject: Literary Criticism]