SOURCE: "Writer without Borders," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XLI, No. 21, December 22, 1994, pp. 59-60.

Hulbert is an American editor and critic. In the following review, she favorably analyzes the stories in Open Secrets, commenting on the provincial setting of Carstairs, Ontario, and the unremarkable, quiet lives of its inhabitants.

Alice Munro is the latest and best proof that a provincial literary imagination can be the most expansive kind of imagination there is. Fixated on lives in out-of-the-way Canadian places and dedicated to the short story rather than to what she has called "the mainstream big novel," she finds pioneering energy in the "feeling of being on the margins": it inspires the desire and the power to remake boundaries. For Munro, marginality has nothing to do with isolation, and everything to do with "connection. That was what it was all about," she writes in The Moons...