4.5 starsThis is my sixth volume of Munro stories and she has yet to disappoint me. Her stories are as dense and deep as the best of novels. In Dear Life it was the themes I fell for; here, though the characters and plots are very strong, it's the sense of place. Munro found her own little postage stamp of native soil (thank you, Mr. Faulkner) in Carstairs, Ontario, though not all the stories are restricted to that one place.I was left breathless by the first story, "Carried Away", (probably my

Please, do not cross your arms over your chest, stubbornly protesting that you can't read short stories because you aren't given enough time to know the characters.That you're not going to invest in 50 pages of something only to have a new story suddenly taken away from you.Blah. Blah. Blah.Get over yourselves, people.When a character is written well, you can NEVER get enough of them. After 945 pages of Lonesome Dove, readers wanted more, more, and more of Gus McCrae. Larry McMurtry broke all of...

I finished this about a month ago and, to be honest, don't now remember much about it. It struck me as competent and interesting rather than exciting and brilliant. I don't know much about Alice Munro and for all I know she might have written much better books and I chose a dud. So, I'll probably give her another chance further down the line. Her central characters in this collection, predominantly female, all seemed to occupy that hinterland between urban and rural, not quite feeling at home in...

A book of ambiguities. Of questions rsther than answers. Too much ambiguity, as in "The Albanian Virgin" and the story feels incomplete. Or was I not attentive enough in my reading, not imaginative enough in contemplating the story's conclusion? Perhaps. The story "Open Secrets" shares a similar ambiguity, but there are enough hints to make a guess at what could have happened to the missing Heather Bell--I have my theory--although this, the solution to the mystery, is not the point of the story....

She's the very devil, is Ms Munro.Wicked.Those words.Words that lodge in a girl's mind and clear a precarious space there with a light buzz around it.I'd like to fuck you if you weren't so uglyShe was not ugly. She knew she was not ugly. How can you ever be sure that you are not ugly?Rhea finds a way to be sure. She marries the man.(Spaceships have Landed)Or there's Liza.Such a wicked girl, Liza.Oh, she may have turned Christian, but she's a wild one. When Bea phones from Toronto where Ladner (B...

Collections of short stories often follow a similar qualitative pattern. The best ones are positioned early on and then towards the end there's a couple of rather uninspired fillers. Not the case here at all. All eight stories are equally inspired and compelling. In fact, the last story is particularly haunting. It's called Vandals and epitomises Munro's method and genius. First of all, her stories always contain more than one story. It's like she lets us see her characters from one perspective

My first Munro. A good thing? A bad thing? I acquired her books before the Nobel Prize pronouncement, but only got around to reading them after. I'm the sort that often needs to be led by the nose like that.I'm reiterating a common complaint when I say that reviewing short story collections is difficult, but still. I thought my luck with finding my way through O'Connor's The Complete Stories heralded a new found ability to transition between varying lengths, but whereas O'Connor drives you into

Damn you Alice Munro. Your stories are the work of a misery guts. And I stick to my feeling that these are not short stories. They are shrivelled up novels, like you can’t be bothered with filling in the details. An impressionistic dab here, a by-your-leave reference there and chunks of life are presumed to have substance. Not enough words for how much are in them. Never mind the movie, most of these stories could fill a mini-series or a BBC serial, the ones they used to do that never seemed to

I think this collection was the first Alice Munro I ever read, many many MANY years ago. I always have this rosy memory of it as the best of the Alice Munro stories, though it's been so long that I could no longer say why, or even be sure that my memory is not wrong.So now I'm re-reading the collection again, and it's all coming back to me, and yes, this is Alice Munro at her best (which is pretty damn good). I'm about halfway through, and a couple of the stories I remember as I read them, while...

On Tuesday morning, while Frances was getting breakfast and Maureen was helping her husband to finish dressing, there was a knock at the front door, by someone who did not notice or trust the bell.I love sentences like that, ones that stop me, draw me in; ones that introduce, define, portend. Alice Munro can not help herself from writing sentences like that, inventing such people.Like this:When Bea spoke of having had a checkered career, she was taking a sarcastic or disparaging tone that did no...

I've been meaning to read Alice Munro for a while. karen put Canadian authors on my radar as a group with George Elliot Clarke, and brian's reviews of her books have been tantalizing. Then the gauntlet was thrown down by that sleazy architect-loving Blake. Well, not really, but I perceived a gauntlet. Architects suck!With the first story, I'm hooked. Amazing. I'm not even done with it yet, the very first story, but...so good. A simple tale that touches down on a solitary librarian's life like a

I don't think it's Alice Munro's fault. I think I just overdosed on her short stories. I loved Runaway, I liked Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, and this one ... eh. Nothing in this collection really grabbed me. The stories I enjoyed most were: -- Open Secrets, because it's about a crime. A girl disappears while on a hiking trip. Because of a tale told by a woman who lives near the woods, a strange elderly man falls under suspicion, but no body is found and there is no eviden...

2.5 stars I read Dear Life a couple years back and thoroughly enjoyed it, so I'd been meaning to read more of Munro's work since. I picked up a copy of this one in Canada (seems fitting) when I was there earlier this month. And sadly it was pretty disappointing. None of the stories were flat-out bad, but they weren't very memorable. Even now having just finished the collection after reading it for the last week or so, nothing stands out to me. I don't expect to love every story in a collection,...

These stories are kind of peculiar. Very subdued, and on the surface often uneventful, they're also filled with little details that give a sense of magnitude and richness to their world. If you imagine narrative as a path, these details are like things clustered closely to the path's sides, even spilling over into it, giving you a sense of the wider and ultimately interconnected reality which enmeshes any sequence of events in the life of an individual, fictional or otherwise. Several of the sto...

Alice Munro writes spectacularly well and different: her stories were not written in the usual and orderly way of storytelling (beginning, middle, end; past, present, future events), but was frequently told in present-past-present-past-future, backward and forward and backward and forward again, through the exchange of letters, and in the eyes of its side characters. My favorites among the eight were Carried Away, The Jack Randa Hotel, and The Wilderness Station. The great thing about how Munro

The thing about Alice Munro is that she makes it look so easy. But what she does is simply (complexly) genius-slash-magic.

if you like this review, i now have website: www.michaelkamakana.com030119: incorporates old review. i think i have read everything published by alice munro (i think i will just call her aunt a by now). i have just finished her collection 'runaway', and decided to try a review of one or two of her stories i have not read in years (decades...). the first collection i had read was as a curious child, a paperback of 'lives of girls and women', then found an old copy of 'dance of the happy shades'.

Alice Munro is one of my favorite writers. She easily is at my top ten, and could even possibly be on my top five. I first read about “Open Secrets” from “Entertainment Weekly”’s top 100 lists of all time- and the magazine ranked this collection as the second greatest short-story collection of all time. Of course, being that Ms. Munro had been ranked and listed, I immediately sought out and dropped everything else I was reading to pore over her 1994 collection. I have read her later collections:...

Excellent, maybe the most consistent collection of her writing that I've read. As always, great writing and surprising structure. Nothing quite as good as Bear Came Over, but then again, what is?A few stories of particular 5-star noteThe Albanian Virgin: Starts out well, but that last page is magical.The Jack Randa Hotel: Such a bold story - it just keeps moving.Carried Away: Gets more and more audacious.

I didn’t enjoy reading any of these stories except “The Jack Randa Hotel,” but felt moved by the end of each one. I hit a wall midway through “A Wilderness Station,” and knew it was time to put this collection back on the shelf for another time. In “The Jack Randa Hotel,” Gail chases her former lover from Canada to Australia in order to snoop out his relationship with another woman. The contrast between the narrator’s desire to assume a new identity and the fact that it’s all in the hope of recl...