This is one wonderful book. Being my first experience of Munro, I found my self entirely engrossed by the very first page. Alice Munro is not pretentious, She weaves the most complex of stories and abstract emotions with simplest of words, just like that. Like its nothing. With a rare clarity of vision and magical storytelling, Munro takes us to the very depths of our minds. How can a writer say so much with so few words?Without being overtly philosophical I must say that Munro knows the crisis

Pivotal momentsI read this at the end of 2019, but am reviewing on the first day of 2020: a day for looking back and forward, for considering who and where we are, and who and where we want to be.If I was going to write short pieces about just four incidents my life, what would I pick? The more I thought about it, the more I realised, like Munro, that it’s not the obvious headline events (graduation, marriage, parenthood, bereavement etc). Often, it’s something seemingly trivial that shapes and

I need only to start reading a few pages of a book by Alice Munro to know I can relax to the strains of a familiar voice and feel secure in the steady pen of a solid writer. Dear Life is a collection of fourteen stories; the last four in ‘Finale’ are autobiographical. The latter which I preferred offered a glimpse of the young Alice Munro growing up in Ontario, pouring over books with her feet in a warming oven, and discovering her story-telling voice as early as her high school days.The stories...

Dear Alice,What a good investment you've turned out to be. A little girl growing up in rural Canada in the early twentieth century, far from the turmoil experienced by your contemporaries in Europe, you nevertheless created several lifetimes’ worth of unique stories from the limited resources you were given. I watched while you observed every detail of your rural existence, filing away images and experiences for future use like some Canadian Picasso accumulating a studio full of junk, which one

I’m always careful not to fall victim to popular opinion when reading any book, especially one by such an acclaimed and beloved writer as Alice Munro. I tried to forget the fact that Munro had only recently won the Nobel prize for fiction. This is only my second Munro so maybe I’m not the best judge of her work but I did find this collection very enjoyable.I find that with Munro it’s the little details. Her stories are everyday stories of everyday people living mainly in small-town Canada, peopl...

I'm a writer myself, and within the last two years or so have begun to concentrate a bit more on writing short fiction.To write is to read, as they say, and I have made an effort to read more short fiction. Many people, from members of my writing group, to lecturers I've listened to, to writers of articles on the subject I have read have advised the same thing; read Alice Munro."Perfect. Masterful. Genius. Epitome of what a short story should be today." All of these are accolades heaped upon Mun...

As with all of Alice Munro's books, I rushed out to buy this newest collection, and then I rushed home, eager to plunge into it. I am an ardent fan of Alice Munro's work, and I think this collection is good, better than good. The most breathtaking, full and energetic of the short stories in this collection is "Amundsen." It takes place in a TB sanatarium near a remote town in Northern Canada. The story is about a young woman who takes a job teaching the children in the sanatarium and, eventually...

This is Alice Munro's most recent collection of short stories. Despite the advanced years of this grande dame of Canadian literature, her narrative powers have lost none of their sharpness. This offering has a family resemblance to other works of hers which I have read in the past. The setting is often a small Canadian town where life is very humdrum and ordinary. In this environment, shocking. tragic, bittersweet and sometimes humorous events can arise. They are chronicled with a detached, ofte...

This new collection pinpoints the moment a person is forever altered by a chance encounter, an action not taken or a simple twist of fate. These are terrific stories by an amazing talent, a writer so good I learn something new with every story.

Story 1: To Reach JapanA story about a woman who's determined to have an affair.Now, I don't condone affairs. But sometimes I can understand them, e.g. Addicted by Zane. But here, no reason is given for Greta cheating. And it doesn't seem to matter who she's cheating with: any available and interested man will do. So it's not “love” affairs she's having.My educated guess about why Greta is cheating on her husband is that she's bored. She's a poet who works from home and she has a small child.The...

alice munro - great contemporary writer and bigtime oxymoron* - has a new collection coming out nov 13, just 3 days after i'm to be married. which is great as i'm expecting to be all reflective and nostalgic but also forward-looking and hopeful, a mishmash of sentiment and emotion and whatnot; which works out as nobody conjures up all that conflicting crap better than munro. so, a few days after the wedding, we head down to del mar and, our first night walking the main drag of the tiny seaside t...

***SPOILERS HIDDEN***(Full disclosure: Book abandoned on page 133, after story 5.)There's something to be said for a quiet story, the kind that unfolds slowly, that's open-ended. This is true of Munro's short stories. On the flip side, this kind of story can lack emotion and dramatic punch. This is also true of Munro's stories. Each of Dear Life's roughly 20- to 25-page-long stories centers on a female protagonist who experiences a sudden revelatory moment. Some of these revelations are life-cha...

I had never read any Alice Munro, and I find it's difficult to say anything sensible about her. Obviously, the stories are very good. (She just won the Nobel Prize. Duh). But what's most impressive is that she doesn't seem to be doing anything in particular. With some writers, it's easy to understand why they're so highly regarded. Take Vladimir Nabokov. I look at his brilliantly constructed sentences, his cleverly ambiguous allusions, his breathtakingly unexpected metaphors, and I sigh: ah, I w...

DEAR WRITING It is reassuring to see that the Nobel Prize for literature went recently to someone who writes so clearly and so unpretentiously.I am not much of a reader of short stories. Shifting from one to the next is always anticlimactic. And often their being grouped in one particular volume is also contrived. This is the case with this collectioin. Most of these stories were first published at different dates in various literary magazines (Granta, Harper’s, Tin House...).The settings are

You know, I have been trying to put my finger on what exactly makes Alice Munro so fascinating. Her writing is without frills - she does not use flowery language or dazzling metaphors. Her stories can be read by any schoolkid without referring a dictionary. Ms. Munro does not write about extraordinary events; her characters are middle class men and women of Canada, going about their humdrum lives. It is Ernest Hemingway plus Jane Austen.The first story sort of had me saying: "Is this the Nobel P...

3 "extremely memorable" stars !!I am writing this at 245 a.m. and we are at our cottage on Lake Huron and it was my favorite kind of day and evening and night and the spirit of Alice Munro was everywhere today. My partner spent a small time in his childhood in the town of Wingham Ontario (this is where Alice Munro grew up)and we had dinner there with his sister who lives very close to Clinton Ontario where Alice Munro currently lives. They are both ardent fans and I relished their discussion as

Dear Life: “One day he just got the idea that he could do the acting and not go through all that church stuff. He tried to be polite about it, but they said it was the Devil getting hold. He said ha-ha I know who it was getting hold. Bye-bye.” Greta should have known (view spoiler)[that he could have possibly been a bye-bye kind of guy, yet she risked her young one and marriage, in order to kiss and fondle this stranger. (hide spoiler)] Loneliness, this inevitable part of our waking, breathing m...

I am a great fan of Munro and wrote my critical essay in grad school mostly about one of her stories. She breaks rules, I believe intentionally and intelligently, and to a purpose. Her earliest stories are simply good, but then over time, as her reputation grew, she could do whatever she liked. And she did. I admire what writers do once they can afford to entirely please themselves. "The final four works in this book are not quite stories . . . things I have to say about my own life" including t...

Where do I begin? My second Munro and I feel that familiar sensation, like feeling for the barely palpable edge of the sticky tape on the roll, a way in, when everything feels like the centre, a cycle that's encircled me, that I've had with me for so long I can't imagine either end.It's not as if the stories are all the same or blur into each other - far from it in fact! The mood and mode of each is so crisply distinct I can imagine Munro writing in an organised study, selecting from the options...