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Stories
by Alice Munro
Book Reviewed by:Here are the infinite betrayals and surprises of love–between men and women, between friends, between parents and children–that are the stuff of all our lives.
In Alice Munro’s superb new collection, we find stories about women of all ages and circumstances, their lives made palpable by the subtlety and empathy of this incomparable writer.
The runaway of the title story is a young woman who, though she thinks she wants to, is incapable of leaving her husband. In "Passion," a country girl emerging into the larger world via a job in a resort hotel discovers in a single moment of stunning insight the limits and lies of that mysterious emotion. Three stories are about a woman named Juliet–in the first, she escapes from teaching at a girls’ school into a wild and irresistible love match; in the second she returns with her child to the home of her parents, whose life and marriage she finally begins to examine; and in the last, her child, caught, she mistakenly thinks, in the grip of a religious cult, vanishes into an unexplained and profound silence. In the final story, "Powers," a young woman with the ability to read the future sets off a chain of events that involves her husband-to-be and a friend in a lifelong pursuit of what such a gift really means, and who really has it.
Throughout this compelling collection, Alice Munro’s understanding of the people about whom she writes makes them as vivid as our own neighbors. Here are the infinite betrayals and surprises of love–between men and women, between friends, between parents and children–that are the stuff of all our lives. It is Alice Munro’s special gift to make these stories as vivid and real as our own.
This is Munro's 12th book, following Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001). It contains eight short stories (several of which have appeared elsewhere) that confront the facts of aging, changing, remembering, regretting and, of course, one's own mortality...continued
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
Alice Munro was born in 1931 in Wingham, a small town in southwestern Ontario,
to a family of small farmers. She received a scholarship to the University of
Western Ontario, but left before graduating in order to marry another student,
James Munro. The Munros raised three daughters and for several years ran a
bookshop in Victoria; they eventually divorced and Alice Munro married Gerald
Fremlin, a geographer. The Fremlins divide their time between Clinton,
Ontario--not far from Munro's hometown of Wingham--and Comox, British Columbia.
She is the three-time winner of the Governor General's Literary Award, Canada's
highest; the Lannan Literary Award; and the W. H. Smith Award, given to Open
Secrets as the best ...
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If you liked Runaway, try these:
by Gail Godwin
Published 2014
Flora is a novel as word-perfect and taut as an Alice Munro short story; like Munro, Godwin has flawlessly depicted the kind of fatalistic situation we can encounter in our youth — one that utterly robs us of our childhood and steers the course for our adult lives.
by Daniel Orozco
Published 2012
Orientation introduces a writer at the height of his powers, whose work surely invites us to reassess the landscape of American fiction.
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