There are few Canadian writers who’ve made it into the glossy pages of The New Yorker— the hallowed halls of contemporary journalism– Alice Munro being one of the few.  A frequent favourite of TNY,  virtually monopolizing the “Canadian diversity” quota in the famously ego and geo-centric magazine, Munro has been published many times in the Fiction section- twice in the last five months.  Now, any Canadian who has spent a little time abroad knows that the international perception of Canada and what it is to be “Canadian” is made up almost exclusively of ridiculous stereotypes that represent a shocking ignorance on the part of the international community.  We may be the second biggest landmass on earth, but as far as world-affairs go we may as well not exist.  Munro has made her career on chronicling the Canada of seventy-years ago, usually setting her stories in pre- or post-war small-towns.  This nostalgic representation of Canada has eeked out a condescending place in world literature– and Munro exports this by the ton to American publications like TNY, who are tickled by these quaint representations of their simple neighbours to the North. This is only too apparent in the January 31st edition of The New Yorker, which features a short story by Alice Munro that the design team chose to illustrate by the below, a naked woman covered by a Hudson Bay blanket.  This is how Americans choose to illustrate a story by their favourite Canadian short story writer– with a suggestive picture that has nothing to do with the substance of the narrative and reduces the quaint Canadian theme to a stereotypical representation of Canadian identity- not to mention that the Hudson Bay Company is now American owned.