Alice Munro - July 10, 1931 to May 13, 2024

 July 10, 1931

Nobel Prize 2013

May 13, 2024

"The Irish novelist Edna O’Brien ranked Ms. Munro with William Faulkner and James Joyce as writers who had influenced her work. Joyce Carol Oates said Munro stories “have the density — moral, emotional, sometimes historical — of other writers’ novels.” And the novelist Richard Ford once made it clear that questioning Ms. Munro’s mastery over the short story would be akin to doubting the hardness of a diamond or the bouquet of a ripened peach.

“With Alice it’s like a shorthand,” Mr. Ford said. “You’ll just mention her, and everybody just kind of generally nods that she’s just sort of as good as it gets" - from The New York Times

"Trying simultaneously to establish herself as a writer (she had her first story published in an undergraduate magazine in 1950 and sold a piece to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1951), she had no time for novel-writing. The short story it had to be.

Routinely likened to Chekhov and Guy de Maupassant, Munro was more radical than the comparison implies. AS Byatt, a longstanding admirer, described how reading Munro made her want to try short fiction herself. Munro stretched and challenged the genre. Not only does she consistently wrongfoot the reader, overturning our expectations of characters and their actions, but she melds several narrative strands together, bringing into one tale several plots." From The Guardian 

Mel Ulm

"The Love of a Good Woman" by Alice Munro (First Published in The New Yorker, December 23, 1996)

Lead story for Family Furnishings Selected Stories 1996 to 2014 by Alice Munro

I recently read an interview in The Paris Review with another contemporary master of the short story, Mavis Gallant, in which she said short stories should not be read back to back.  You should space out your readings of stories.  There are twenty five stories in Alice Munro's collection Family Furnishings Selected Short Stories 1996 to 2014.  If this book was a novel, I could finish it two good reading days.  The stories of Munro (winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize) are so rich in detail with such finely rendered characters that the collection begs to be read slowly, letting the stories sink into your consciousness.

Like many of her stories, "The Love of a Good Woman" is set in rural Ontsrio.  It begins with four early teenage boys, friends, running about after school.  Munro uses small details brilliantly to help us understand the kind of families the boys are from.  The boys make a very big discovery, from this we learn of the lives of their parents, especially their mothers and sisters.  I admit I was shocked by the stark scenes of sexual abuse (I guess I was just seeing them not going with the face of the author!).  The story is structured around what led the boys to make their big discovery.

I was kindly given a review copy of this collection.  I hope to complete it by year end.  

Mel u

"The Bear Came Over The Mountain by Alice Munro ( December 27, 1999 inThe New Yorker)

My Posts on Alice Munro

When Alice Munro won The Nobel Price short story lovers world wide felt gratified to see the genre recognized.  Alice Munro has published 139 short stories and one novel, most set in her native rural Ontario.    I was kindly recently give an advance review copy of her forthcoming collection of twenty five short stories published from 1995 to 2014,  Family Furnishings.  It is a generous collection, well over five hundred pages.  

"The Bear Came Over the Mountain" was originally published in The New Yorker.  It is set in rural Ontario and centers on a retired college professor and his wife.  My main purpose in this post is to keep a record of my reading of this excellent story and to share with my readers a link to the story. 

Many have rightly said that Alice Munro can do more with thirty pages than most other authors can do with three hundred.   This is very true of "The Bear Comes Over The Mountain".  One day the professor finds his wife wandering around outside, she does not recognize him.  He has to choice but to place her in a facility.  Much of the story takes place on his visits.  She and a man their have formed a very close bond. ,He talks to the nurses their and they say these things happen but they pass.  The husband thinks back on the decades of their marriage.  We see the impact on changing habits on college life.  In time he meets the wife of the man his wife is bonded with.  She tells him not to be concerned on sex as her husband is not capable. The insights into both marriages are very moving.  The ending of the story was very satisfying. 

This is a very much worth your time story which you can read here

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/10/21/the-bear-came-over-the-mountain-2

Mel u

"The Hired Girl" by Alice Munro (April 11, 1994, The New Yorker,reprinted in Family Furnishings, 2014)

My Posts on Alice Munro

When Alice Munro won The Nobel Price short story lovers world wide felt gratified to see the genre recognized.  Alice Munro has published 139 short stories and one novel, most set in her native rural Ontario.    I was kindly recently give an advance review copy of her forthcoming collection of twenty five short stories published from 1995 to 2014,  Family Furnishings.  It is a generous collection, well over five hundred pages.  I have read only a few stories by Alice Munro, I find it takes me a while to absorb one of her stories.   In two or three good reading days I could easily read most five hundred page novels.  I think reading all of the stories in Family Furnishings back to back would be a much more challenging task.  I actually think one of the reasons many say they do they don't like short stories is that they require more mental energy to read, with any depth.  To read a Munro short story requires and will reward your fullest powers.  The gift of this collection will provide me a way to read more of her work.  

The story is narrated by a young woman, seventeen, from rural Ontario.  She talks enough about her family to let us see they are very hard working, used to be better off than they are now.  They once had a "hired girl" but now they don't. We get a really good sense of her life from her descriptions of the various hired girls that worked for her family. The woman is off school for the summer so her mother finds her a job as a live in "hired girl" for a family who owns their own private island. 

When the girl get to the island, owned by a couple, the woman owner tells her that the name of the island "Nausicaa" comes from Shakespeare. The girl knows it is actually a reference from The Odyssey but she is smart enough to keep quiet on that.  When I heard that my feelings for the young woman deepened.  There is just so much in this shorter than normal Munro work.  We see a lot of what happens on the island, including a shocking revelation at the close of the story, one that took me totally by surprise.  Munro is brilliant in her subtle use of class markers.  In one very revealing moment the girl says where she is from it is considered OK for girls to stay in school, most will become teachers, but the masculinity of a boy who stays too long in school is suspect.  Being too smart is not really an approved thing for anyone.  

In one super interesting touch, the girl notices the woman reading Seven Gothic Tales. The woman notices the girl reading it and she tells her the book makes no sense to her.  We are never told it was written by Isak Dinesen.  The girl is fascinated by it.  

There just is an amazing amount of life in the beautiful prose of "The Hired Girl".  I have left out a lot. 

Please share your favorite Munro stories with us.

Would you do a nonstop reading of this collection?

Mel u

"Leaving Waverley"" by Alice Munro (2012, in The O.Henry/Pen Best Short Stories 2013)

The next time someone says they don't like short stories because they are not "substantial" enough for them ask how many stories by Flannery O'Connor, Alice Munro, James Joyce, Guy De Maupassant, Elizabeth Bowen, Katherine Mansfield, Franz Kafka or Raymond Carver they have read.  

The awarding of the Nobel Prize to Alice Munro is being received with great joy in the short story world.  In the Guardian yesterday they had brief articles by famous writers talking about her works.  Most mentioned how she so masterfully handles the flow of time in the lives of her characters.  For sure I saw this "Leaving Waverly"

Like most her stories I have so far read "Leaving Waverley" is set in rural Ontario.  It encompasses many years and a woman who makes a life changing trip is at its heart.  It is a marvelous very moving story.  Two times as I was reading this work I gasped in delight and surprise by the turn of events in the lives of the characters.  Her stories kind of sink into your consciousness. 

Please share your favorite Munro stories with us?

"Miles City, Montana" by Alice Munro (From her Progress of Love, 1986)

Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize for literature yesterday.  Short story lovers world wide are rejoicing!  

In the 75 Q and A sessions I have done with short story writers I always ask who among contemporary short story writers they most admire.  Alice Munro was overwhelmingly the most common answer.  I have in the four years of my blog only posted on four of her short stories.  I think one reason for this is that one of her short stories has more impact and real life than many other author's novels.   Most of her stories are set in rural Ontario, her home.  Most center on the lives of women.  She has published one novel and fourteen collections of short stories.  

My main purpose in this post is just to join in the celebration of this wonderful pick by the Nobel Committee.  The short story is often treated as the "step child" of the literary world and it is good to see it take center stage.  

"Miles City Montana" begins with a woman telling how her father found the body of a lost young boy, as part of a search party in the Canadian woods.  The boy drowned in a lake.  The boy was being raised by his father, the mother deserted the family.  The narrator recalls the boy as a kind of trouble maker.  Her reflections on his death permeate the fabric of her life.  Munro flashes us twenty years ahead in time from the narrator at eight to maybe twenty-eight.  She is married with two children.  There are some simply brilliant things said in the story about being a parent, about how we somehow unconsciously force our children into the roles and character we have picked for them.    The children are three and six.  The family is going on a long road trip vacation.  The kids are beside themselves with excitement.  The family trip is just perfect.  A near tragedy is avoided.  This is a rich story with so much to offer the reader.  

If you have not yet read one of her stories, there are a few online you can read for free.  

"Silence" by Alice Munro

"Silence" by Alice Munro (2005, 41 pages)

Canada-Country 2 of 196

Prior Project 196 posts

If you are an author and want to represent your country, please contact me.  If you want to do a guest post on your favorite story for the feature please contact me also.

If you are a publisher that has an anthology that is done in the 196 spirit, please contact me as I will be spotlighting appropriate collections.  

Alice Munro (Canada, 1931) is almost the universal choice for the title of world's best living short story writer, with William Trevor as a close second. I know I need to read a great many more stories by both writers. I have previously posted on two of Munro's short stories. I am currently reading her collection of stories, Runaway. I really loved the middle story in the collection, "Silence". One of the things Munro seems a total,master of is the ability to tell us a great deal about her characters while still leaving their central human mystery intact and the marvelous way she does this in this story is one of the reasons I loved it.

I will tell just a small amount of the plot. The story, set in Munro's home country of Canada, centers on an educated, intelligent woman who has always been very close to her now young adult daughter. To her great confusion, her daughter has left home to join an Ashran, a center for alternative spiritual teaching. Months go by and she does not hear from her daughter. She goes to the center and her daughter has left it some time ago for parts unknown. The spiritual mother superior tells her that the daughter was raised without a spiritual background. Years go by and the mother gets only Christmas cards then even the cards stop. She goes on with her life, trying to face reality but never really giving up,on hearing from her daughter. She never understands why her beloved daughter cut off all contact with her and what Munro leaves out of this story is what makes her a master.

There is a deep sorrow and sadness in this profound story.

I hope to read more of her work in 2013.

Please share your favorite Munro stories with us



Mel u

"Axis" by Alice Munro

"Axis" by Alice Munro (2011)

The Best American Short Stories 2012

A Reading Life Project

Alice Munro
1931
Ontario, Canada

I have three "Best of 2012" short story anthologies, one devoted to British Short Stories, one to European Fiction and The Best of American Short Stories 2012, edited by Tom Perrotta.   It is my hope to finish these three collections by the end of the year    I will  keep a running best of the best contest in which I list the top five from each collection and the top ten overall.   There are about seventy stories in these collections so I hope to get a bit of a sense of the contemporary short story from this project and read some great stories in the process.   I will only be posting on a small percent of the stories as it will often take me as long or longer to write a post on a story as to read another one.    In order to be eligible for inclusion in the collection a writer must be either an American or a Canadian (or have taken up long term residence) and their story must have been published in an American or Canadian journal.

Top Five Stories So Far (with only four read-in random order)
1.  "Diem Perdidi" by Julie Otsuka
2.  "Axis" by Alice Munro
3.  "The Last Speaker of the Language" by Carol Anshaw (no post)
4.  "Miracle Polish" by Steven Millhauser (no post)

I think a lot of people were hoping either Alice Munro or William Trevor was going to get the 2012 Nobel Prize for literature. I certainly was.    Many of the short story writers I have been in contact with in the last two years have said they greatly admire the work of Alice Munro.   Buried in Print, one of the best of book blogs, is doing a read through of all of Munro's stories.   I have only read and posted on only one of her short stories, "Runaway" so I was very glad to find one of her stories included in The Best of American Short Stories 2012.

This story is set in rural Ontario, just like most of her other stories.   Munro is known for covering many years of characters lives in her stories.   That is just what she does in "Axis".   Reading this story I cannot help but wonder how influenced her work is by the extreme cold of the Canadian winter during which just going outside without heavy clothing can kill you.  It also essentially traps most people inside in small quarters often heated to an uncomfortable degree. People say escaping from a trap is one of the common threads found in many of her short stories.

"Axis" introduces us to two Canadian college women, good friends.   They are on the bus taking them back to their rural homes.   They carry serious books with them like The Medieval World, Montcalm and Wolfe, and The Jesuit Relations, so their families can see they are serious students.   They will most likely end up as high school students.   To their families, they are farm girls.  Of course the big event in the life of college women is "the first big romance".   In one great scene, the mother of one of the women walks in on her daughter and her boyfriend naked in bed.  Any parent can relate to the horror of this.  (We have three three teenage daughters)   It was a very ugly scene and the man fled the house never to be seen again.  The other woman ends up marrying and having six children with her first boyfriend.  

As the story closes, Munro flashes us decades forward to an accidental encounter between the man who ran away and the other woman.   This is where the brilliance of Munro shows through.

"My Life Would Make a Great Movie,
Mr Le Fanu left out the best parts"
Carmilla

"Axis" is a great short story and I really hope to read a lot more of her stories.  

Mel u
The Reading Life
@thereadinglife

Runaway by Alice Munro

Runaway by Alice Munro (2004, 335 pages)

Runaway by Alice Munro (1930-Ontario, Canada) is a collection of eight short stories.    All the stories are set in Canada, mostly in Ontario, and all have as their central characters women more or less trying to runaway from the circumstances  that trap them.    Most of the stories are about thirty five pages long, with the final story being twice as long as the others.    (I have previously posted on the title story from the collection, "Runaway".)

Most of the women in the stories come from small towns in Ontario.   I was pleased to see that several of them are very literate.   The stories are about the accidents that shape our lives, in fact in two  of the stories this is literally true as car accidents play a big part in some of the plots.   Some of the characters do seem a bit lost and some of them or their daughters ended up married to doctors.    Munro packs a lot of life into thirty pages and make the years fly by for us.  

I got a good feeling for what life must be like in the Canadian winter from these stories.     Many people who have only lived in tropical climates like the Philippines find it hard to relate to the closed in feeling such harsh winters can impart to lives.    Living in a climate dominated by rain cycles seems to me to shape the psyche in ways very different from one dominated by long periods of potentially killing cold.

I enjoyed reading these stories a lot and I can see why Munro is such a highly regarded short story writer.    If you were to take a poll among short story lovers as to who the best living writer in the genre was, I think most people would say "Alice Munro" unless they are from Ireland and then "William Trevor" might be the pick.

Munro has published ten collections of short stories.   I will next read her The View from Castle Rock, probably in 2012.

Please let us know of your experience with Munro.


Mel u

"Runaway" by Alice Munro

"Runaway" by Alice Munro (2004, 45 pages)

"Runaway" is the lead story in a collection of Alice Munro's short stories, Runaway.    Alice Munro (1931, Canada) is a greatly admired writer of short stories.    (Last year I read via Dailylit.com her story "Fiction" but did not post on it.)    She has received a great many awards for her work and is admired in Academia as well as among general readers throughout the world.    A bit of quick research indicates that most of her stories are about women and are often set in South Western Ontario, Canada.  

Most all of the short stories I have posted on can be read online.    In contrast to my normal practice of reading short stories online, I purchased the collection this story was in about a year ago.  

It took me a little while to get into it but after just a few pages I really liked the beautiful prose style of Munro. People often complain that short stories do not have enough character development to interest them.   Munro in "Runaway"  does a great job in developing the characters of the lead figures in the story.   There are at least three runaways in "Runaway".   One of the runaways is a much loved family goat.   One is an oppressed wife. One, and this was not so clear to me, is the widow of a strange poet.    One of the reasons I think people like Munro's stories is that she tells us enough about the characters to get us interested but still leaves a lot of blanks for us to fill in.   She gives us concrete details about the lives of the people in "Runaway" so we can feel we understand how they live but  still leaves some mystery.    I easily was able to believe in everyone in "Runaway".    

There are seven other stories in  Runaway.   I think now I will read them all slowly over the course of the next few months.  

Mel u