“We live in time - it holds us and molds us - but I never felt I understood it very well. And I'm not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it d...

The title of this fabulous collection of short stories is a misnomer. There isn't a smidgen of happiness, except, perhaps in the last title story. I am not necessarily a connoisseur of short stories, but those I have read would never be described as happy - brilliant, lifelike, deeply moving would be more the case. Who needs happy in a short story?Alice Munro's stories in this collection ( I will definitely be reading her other collections) are about life, death, lies, guilt, and truths that may...

Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro🌟🌟🌟🌟This was my first time reading short stories and I absolutely loved it. The combination of Alice Munro and her short stories makes for an incredibly enjoyable read.

Five of these stories I'd read before (online at the New Yorker) and it was a pleasure to read them again, even to note a few subtle changes that had been made, in particular, with the one I think is my favorite ("Face"). This pleasure in reading Munro, I think, comes not from her characters or her plots, though she obviously is very talented in those facets, but from the themes of the stories, some of which need to be teased out. I especially felt this way with a story ("Wood") that I didn't ev...

Alice Munro writes stories like guts: miles of story, packed into this tiny little space. You get into it and it explodes and there's, like, story everywhere. They make you wonder why people write novels. It's not so much that they have more to say, it's that they take so much longer to say it than Munro does. She makes everyone else look like they're doodling.Dimensions: A woman whose husband no longer lives with her learns to maybe move on a bit. Well done for what it is, but didn't make a hug...

Munro on Audio and in PrintI started the collection on audiobook during a road trip, and finished it on paper. Listening to a story is a curious experience: you have no idea how long each it is going to last, and so are held in the total control of the writer. And when that writer has the mastery of Alice Munro, the sensation is both alarming and curiously satisfying. The first story, for instance, "Dimensions," beautifully read by Kimberly Farr, is about an hour long, but it has already taken y...

Leave it to Alice Munro to humble me as a reader. To leave me feeling tricked. To make me feel dumb. To show me that even when I think I'm paying attention, I'm really not paying attention. What was I thinking of at that moment? What was occupying my attention? Clearly not the story I was reading, the story being 'Wenlock Edge' with that last section so crucial to giving context to the section before it. It wasn't a magic trick, just a rearrangement of the timeline. And I missed it. And now that...

So, yes, I have read it again. This is a collection of marvellous short stories that I have read numerous times as it is one of my assessed texts, and one I shall be examined on in the coming days. Whilst a few stories that I did not warm to the first time round now feel very saturated now, those that I loved are still brilliant, and that is just testament to their high regard I hold them in.'Dimensions', 'Free Radicals' and 'Face' are my favourites from the collection, and they are for sure som...

There should be a separate category for Munro: make those five stars doubles. She takes you into her house of fiction, opening doors onto pain and horror, onto hope and happiness (too much), onto searing truth and ravaging emotion, and then stops, leaving you blinking in the sunlight, with the feeling that one layer of protective skin has been removed. I feel that there is a connecting theme: the power of story-telling and literature. Stories to save life in Free Radicals, to rescue and calm in

As a friend of mine said, I'm not going to say this book was good, very good or excellent. It was strong. Written in a way that I felt my eyes were hammered to the pages from the beginning. Now that I've just finished the book, I can not leave the mood and the world of the last story. I'm still in it. Too Much Happiness (the title story) is the story of a Russian woman mathematician, Sofia Kovalevskaya. Her relationships, challenges, achievements, awards, travels, loves...and finally her early d...

Something about these stories makes my skin creep. There is a feeling of total emptiness, as if I am watching people's lives unfold in front the plexiglass of a zoo enclosure. Munro is a talented writer, but there is nothing showy in her style. I felt no connection with the characters, the time and place are not developed in great detail. All you are left with the uncomfortable situations she picks as her material: unfinished lives, death, misunderstanding, lies. I'll come back to Munro the next...

Great expectations...but alas. I have to agree with this review: "This was easy to read and the stories and characters were easy to become. I just felt like, why? Why did she have these situations happen to her characters and why did she bother to write about them? It's not like I demand a lot of action, I just didn't get her choices. Just because you can write beautifully doesn't mean you ought to write beautifully about such things. The situations and the characters didn't seem to mesh for me....

"Something happened here. In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places."I pulled this quote from one of the stories in this very fine collection from the master of short stories, Alice Munro. Yet, I believe it sums up exceedingly well one of the themes running through every single story. There exist these significant moments in one’s life, no matter how remarkable they may or may not appear at the time, that s...

is there another living writer of fiction who, while reading, produces as many of these: 'yes! exactly! a tiny but revelatory detail i've never considered in such a light... and never so precisely expressed!' -- no. there isn't. alice munro is chimney-smoke smell and end-of-day melancholy. the goal is to read everything she's written.

The starkest realization I had while reading Munro’s 2009 collection of ten stories in Too Much Happiness was the absence of happiness. The stories are a sordid depiction of flawed humanity at its worst and most shameful. I took breaks in between stories and had little desire to return to them, a very uncharacteristic response to Munro’s writing. I have to admit nonetheless that Munro is a master at fathoming the depth of human duplicity, evil, vindictiveness as well as the human capacity for ma...

Mighty difficult time choosing between *** & **** for "Too Much Happiness." Alice Munro is more than capable of writing a good sturdy yarn, although the *** may indicate that she is mediocre at best at concocting brilliant short stories. All ten of these shorts are written in an accessible way, but the themes are harsh & bleak. 2 of them involve infanticide (one about a father killing his children, another about kids murdering kids) others are about... straight-up death. The titular story is the...

"Every one of us will be forgotten, Sophia thought but did not say, because of the tender sensibilities of men - particularly of a young man - on this point."This quote is not only my favourite quote of the book, it summarizes some of Munro's writing qualities quite nicely. She is sometimes very witty and almost always cynical, perhaps slightly bitter and an acute observer. Four very fine qualities in a writer, yet for me there is something missing in most of the stories. Something of a more for...

The title of her latest collection could sum up the feeling Alice Munro's fans get when they encounter her work. Yet is it possible to get too much of a good thing?Hardly, when you're in the hands of such an inventive writer, one whose carefully crafted, richly suggestive stories burrow their way into the subconscious like actual memories.Even in her late 70s, this year's Man Booker International Prize winner gets to show off some new tricks. Two of the stories are among the handful she's writte...

I finished this short story collection but decided not to give it a rating. While her writing is intriguing, this might been the wrong book of hers to pick up next as I'm not a keen short story reader. It's rare that I end up enjoying them and think I need to see if she has a full novel to read next

Alice Munro, where have you been all my life? I’ve nothing against short stories but for some reason, I’ve hardly read anything of hers and all I can say is, I am totally blown away. These are brilliant and insightful stories, all with an unexpected twist. Too much happiness? That must be the reader’s state of mind because in the main the characters don’t have a lot of it. Munro packs anguish, indecision, action and very human responses into 20-30 pages that have the depth and complexity of a no...