Who Do You Think You Are?: Penguin Modern Classics Edition

Alice Munro

Apr 2006 · Penguin Canada

About this ebook

A small-town girl who dreams of greater things, trying to get away from a place that wants to hold her back. A series of stories exploring the pursuit of ambition, and the fear and shame of potential failure.

In this award-winning collection from the acclaimed Alice Munro, we follow Rose and her stepmother, Flo: residents of the poorer side of Hanratty. Rose is determined to get away, to pursue her ambitions, but as she moves through her life, from university in Vancouver to a crumbling marriage to a career as an actress and interviewer, she is constantly plagued by the question that has haunted her since the beginning: "Who do you think you are?"

Ratings and reviews

Had to read this for a high school English class. It was definitely one of the most boring things I've ever had to read. Analyzed it deeper than I would ever want to look at anything especially something so boring. Although these are called short stories there anything but short and if you're looking for an entertaining twist you won't find one. Alice Munro is the treasure to Canadian literature and will be required reading for many high school students for years to come. Sucks to be you.

About the author

Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario and attended the University of Western Ontario (now Western University), studying journalism and English. Her first collection of stories was published in 1968 as Dance of the Happy Shades, which garnered much acclaim and won the Governor General’s Award for English fiction that year. Three years later, she published her only novel, Lives of Girls and Women. Over the next few decades, she published many more short story collections, including Who Do You Think You Are?; The Moons of Jupiter; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, from which a story was later adapted into the two-time Academy Award–winning movie, Away from Her; Runaway; and The View from Castle Rock. Her stories appeared regularly in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review. In 1978 Munro received her second Governor General’s Award for Who Do You Think You Are? and her third in 1986 with The Progress of Love. In 2009 she won the Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work. Her final story collection, Dear Life, came in 2012, and the next year, the same year she retired from writing, she won the Nobel Prize in Literature, hailed as the “master of the contemporary short story.” Munro has also been the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the W.H. Smith Award, two Giller Prizes, several Trillium Prizes, the Jubilee Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award, among many others. She lives in Millbrook, Ontario.