General Introduction
– Where’s Nathan?
– Recording at night
– Listener feedback
– On lost causes
– A question for Nathan to answer later

Situating Munro
– Her life and times
– Restraint, not pyrotechnics
– Munro as a woman writer
– Her contemporaries, influences, and heirs
– Transparent writing
– Munro and the New Yorker
– In which nothing happens

Munro’s Locales
– Material conditions
– Class and location
– Surface and artificiality
– Wealth as innocence
– The ethics of contentment

Gender
– Wanting to write
– Double spheres
– A man’s man’s man’s man’s world
– St. Jane
– The constraints of girlhood
– No preaching, no polemics

Munro and Religion
– Not a theological imagination
– Religion as realist backdrop
– Waiting for a miracle
– Another lost cause

Other Moving Passages
– In which something almost happens
– How wealthy people drink
– Munro’s treatment of adolescence