Alice Munro's Miraculous Art is a collection of sixteen original essays on Nobel laureate Alice Munro's writings. The volume covers the entirety of Munro's career, from the first stories she published in the early 1950s as an undergraduate at the University of Western Ontario to her final books. It offers an enlightening range of approaches and interpretive strategies, and provides many new perspectives, reconsidered positions and analyses that will enhance the reading, teaching, and appreciation of Munro's remarkable-indeed miraculous-work. Following the editors' introduction-which surveys Munro's recurrent themes, explains the design of the book, and summarizes each contribution-Munro biographer Robert Thacker contributes a substantial bio-critical introduction to her career. The book is then divided into three sections, focusing on Munro's characteristic forms, themes, and most notable literary effects.

Oil, the black gold of Texas, has given rise to many a myth. Oil could turn a man overnight into a millionaire--and did, for some. But these myths have obscured what life was really like in the oil patch, a place that was neither the El Dorado of legend nor quite the unredeemed den of sin and iniquity that some feared.

In Roughnecks, Drillers, and Tool Pushers, Gerald Lynch provides a much-needed insider's view of the oil industry, describing life in various oil fields in and around Texas. He also chronicles changes in drilling methods and oil-field technology and how these changes affected him and his fellow oil-field workers. No one else has written a working-class history of the oil fields as colorful and articulate as this one.