Every time I read Munro, I wonder what took me so long to get back to her. But it’s good to have space with her. Her stories are overwhelming, leaving you thinking long past you’ve read their last pages. A story I thought would be my least favorite (“What Is Remembered”), I read a second time because my mind was completely changed by its end. Her characters linger in the mind and the themes—family furniture; suicide; marriages of the 1950s and 60s, and their expectations; ‘extraneous’ people as

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is my fifth book by Alice Munro and also the least pleasing. Munro writes exceptionally fine prose and if I were to rate this collection of short stories on prose alone, I would give this five stars. I continue to marvel at Munro’s facility to express the intractable, the sublimal, and the unutterable with startling clarity. The nine stories depict a host of flawed individuals who make no apology for their flawed lives. They are difficult to re...

I sometimes get into conversations with people who have a hard time connecting with the short-story format; they say that they hardly have time to muster an emotional involvement in the characters and events, before the story is over. To those readers I might recommend Alice Munro. True, I have only experienced one of her collections, but the stories in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage are nothing if not emotionally affecting—or "crushingly tragic," I suppose, if you want to g...

Reading Munro is daunting at first: you can't read her stories like other people's. I thought I could get through at my usual 75%- concentration, skimming past the details of the cousin's wedding and blah blah other accessory nonsense. But with Munro, nothing can be taken as accessory! You'll read for three pages, realise you haven't been paying attention and that Munro won't throw you a pronoun other than "she", and you're like, 'Who is she? Ahhh, I'll keep reading for a few more pages and pick...

Nobel Laureate Alice Munro is certainly an elegant, gifted, subtle writer, a specialist in short stories, and this collection is quite strong in many ways. Only one of these stories really knocked me out, though; at times, her elegance and restraint leave me a little at arms’ length from being totally immersed in the lives of the characters she’s created. Still, there’s never a false note, and while some stories feel more slight than others, they are always compelling and exhibit a welcome clari...

A COLLECTION OF PARADIGM SHIFTS INTO OTHER FOLKS’ PRIVATE HEADSPACE!When this diminutive little lady from small-town Ontario, Canada won the Nobel Prize for Literature she remarked:"I want my stories to move people. “I don't care if they're women, men or children...“I want my stories to be something about life that makes people say - not 'oh, isn't that the truth' - but to feel some kind of reward from the writing. “And that doesn't mean it has to be a happy ending or anything, but just that eve...

If this book had been a novel, I would have put it down after the first 50 pages. However, because it is a collection of short stories, I convinced myself that maybe the next story would be more interesting; if I didn't keep reading, I might not be giving Munro a fair chance.Alas, I reached the end of the book and felt nothing but relief--relief that it was over. Munro is a lovely writer, with a good command of language, but her choice of subject matter, story development, and characters was uni...

My ambivalence about Alice Munro is reflected well in the fact that I've been reading this book (which contains no more than nine stories, averaging 30-40 pages each) off and on for something like six years, and only just this late afternoon finished it. On the one hand, her stories seem like such weak tea to me - so little happens, the characters are never more than gently amusing, it's all so dull, mundane, Ontarian. When I take one up in a reading mood that's hungry for escape and speedy exci...

“Forsooken” but not forsakenIn a time of either careless abandon or generous inclusion of any literary technique ever thought of, Alice Munro still manages to surprise the reader, not only with her deceptive narrative perspective or her sly manipulation of the timeline, but also with the unexpected development of well-known themes, the powerful recreation of places and people and the plethora of significations. I read so many volumes of short stories, including one of hers, but I can hardly rec

My reaction to almost every movie I watch is to announce loudly to the room after finishing it, “WELL, I'LL NEVER GET THOSE TWO HOURS OF MY LIFE BACK.”I get peevish and resentful after sitting through bad movies, and I usually need to read a new book or watch Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy emerging from the lake in his wet, white shirt before I can shake other bad movie images from my mind.So, imagine my surprise when I stumbled upon Hateship, Loveship with Kristen Wiig, and I not only liked it, I kin...

The first Munro that doesn't have a melancholic atmosphere but rather a humorous touch that seems to say "hey, just flow with it, you never know where the tide will take you, so follow your impulses and it might be alright".Johanna is a maid who incidentlly crosses paths with Ken, the son in law, now recently widowed, of Johanna's employer. She is plain, uninteresting and rather timid, so she is taken by surprise when a heated letter declaring passionate love from Ken reaches her. What she can't...

This is a beautiful compilation of amazing and honest short stories that all deal with life. I was taken away with the very first story, and I was amazed throughout the book with how Alice Munro is able to write about things and situations in life that we don't normally think that much about in our own lives. What I love the most about this compilation is how it is so honest. It's okay to fall in love with other people, but it's your choice whether you want to act on it or not. It's okay to grow...

When I read Alice Munro I'm always left with that special private surprise of finding thoughts and epiphanies I've never been able to put into words. And because of these moments, I feel like she's writing just for me. Munro has the power to make me forget I'm reading a collection of short stories. Each one is organic and vast in a way that I can never predict. There's always a delicate fear that time will quickly alter the path of each character, but when it does there is satisfaction, no matte...

I find myself shamefully admitting that I have made a huge effort to finish this book, it is not the first time I read Alice Munro, but in this work I found myself in serious difficulty to appreciate anything....I have no idea if this was due to the Italian translation, in my opinion not perfect, but the writing seemed to me tedious and syntactically too pompous and unnecessarily complex.There was not even one of the characters that somehow captured my soul, it’s a bit like I read a warranty man...

This collection of stories by Alice Munro is typical of much of her work. The stories are populated by people leading what looks on the surface like humdrum lives. But just underneath the surface, strange feelings boil, ready to erupt when events occur which make this possible. Munro has a lot of knowledge about the various types of relationships between men and women, how they can be built, twisted, broken and remade. These are not happy stories--in fact, some of them are disturbing. But the na...

My favourite Munro. I love it and am a bit ambivalent at the same time. The stories are so close to real life, so undisguised, and about such difficult subjects, that reading them is a bit like going to the therapist. It's a really intense experience. She reaches somewhere in my psyche and exposes truths and issues I am unwilling to explore on my own. She shows scenarios that may happen, and if they happened, they would be painful. To use an analogy: reading Munro for me is a bit like passing by...

A lifetime of reading Alice MunroI feel like I’ve grown up with Alice Munro. I studied some of her short stories as a student (high school and college); I took a senior seminar in her work at university – long before she won the Nobel Prize for Literature; I’ve seen her read several times (my favourite was when she read the masterpiece “Differently” in its entirety.) And I continue to read and reread her work. Some of her stories are so familiar I can recite whole passages by heart.(Nerd confess...

Alice Munro, where have you been all my life?! The level of observation and psychological insight on show in this collection, the ability to explore and portray complex human emotions in just a few sentences - these are the reasons I read fiction. I feel giddy about the many Munro books I have yet to read.There are nine stories in this one, set mostly in western Canada. The protagonists are mainly women and over the course of only a few pages, we learn so much about their lives. The love and los...

Four- or five-stars for the skill and power of the writing, three-stars for my overall enjoyment of the collection. Alice packs plots other authors would spend novels unraveling in short stories built with astonishing linguistic economy. I've seen it noted elsewhere, but Munro demands her readers' attention and you can easily become lost in her time-hopping, name-dropping narratives if you aren't keeping up with her. Some of these stories span whole lives, others whole relationships. Her stories...

It took me a little while to get used to the style of the stories in this collection - this being my first experience of Alice Munro's writing - but once I "got it" I found the stories to be brilliant, in a kind of subdued, quiet, melancholy way. I think the last story (The Bear Came Over the Mountain) was my favourite, although I particularly liked Queenie and the titular story as well.