现代大学英语精读6（第二版）BK6教师用书Unit4.pdfVIP

Unit 4 Nettles (Excerpts) Alice Munro Additional Background Information (About the Author and her Short Story, “Nettles”) Regarded by many critics as one of the greatest living writers of short fiction in English literature, Alice Munro has often been compared to Chekhov. Born into a family of farmers in the small rural town of Wingham, Ontario, Munro began writing in her teens. She published her first story in 1950 when she was still a student at the University of Western Ontario. Her first collection of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades , was published in 1968. It received high acclaim and won that year’s Governor General’s Award, the most respected literary prize in Canada. Her next work was Lives of Girls and Women (1971), a collection of interlinked stories published as a novel, which won the Canadian Booksellers Association International Book Year Award. Her other books are all short story collections: Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (1974); Who Do You Think You Are? (1978, titled The Beggar Maid in English and American editions); The Moons of Jupiter (1982); The Progress of Love (1986); Friend of My Youth (1990); Open Secrets (1994); Selected Stories (1996); Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001); The View from Castle Rock (2006); Too Much Happiness (2009) and Dear Life (2012). “Nettles”, which first appeared in the New Yorker in 2000, is included in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. In this story, the author uses first-person narration. The plot of the story centers on a middle-aged woman’s 1979 reunion with a childhood male friend, but it moves back and forth b