Friday Fiction: Alice Munro, Short Story Writer

--by Hanje Richards

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During her distinguished career, Alice Munro has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including the Man Booker International Prize, three of Canada's Governor General's Literary Awards and two of its Giller Prizes, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Lannan Literary Award, England's W. H. Smith Book Award, the United States' National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Edward MacDowell Medal in literature. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages.
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A frequent theme of Munro’s early work has been the dilemmas of a girl coming of age and coming to terms with her family and the small town she grew up in. In her more recent work, she has shifted her focus to the travails of middle age, of women alone, and of the elderly. Her style places the fantastic next to the ordinary, with each undercutting the other in ways that simply, and effortlessly, evoke life.
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Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories - In the nine stories that make up this short story collection, Alice Munro achieves new heights, creating narratives that loop and swerve like memory, and conjuring up characters as thorny and contradictory as people we know ourselves.
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A tough-minded housekeeper jettisons the habits of a lifetime because of a teenager’s practical joke. A college student visiting her brassy, unconventional aunt stumbles on an astonishing secret and its meaning in her own life. An incorrigible philanderer responds with unexpected grace to his wife’s nursing-home romance. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is Munro at her best -- tirelessly observant, serenely free of illusion, deeply and gloriously humane.
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Open Secrets: Stories - In these eight tales, Alice Munro evokes the devastating power of old love suddenly recollected. She tells of vanished schoolgirls and indentured frontier brides and an eccentric recluse who, in the course of one surpassingly odd dinner party, inadvertently lands herself a wealthy suitor from exotic Australia. And Munro shows us how one woman's romantic tale of capture and escape in the high Balkans may end up inspiring another woman who is fleeing a husband and lover in present-day Canada.
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Runaway: Stories - Runaway is a book of extraordinary stories about love and its infinite betrayals and surprises, from the title story about a young woman who, though she thinks she wants to, is incapable of leaving her husband, to three stories about a woman named Juliet and the emotions that complicate the luster of her intimate relationships. In Munro’s hands, the people she writes about -– women of all ages and circumstances, and their friends, lovers, parents, and children -– become as vivid as our own neighbors.
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Too Much Happiness: Stories (FIC MUNRO TOO) Ten new stories by Alice Munro, the winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize.
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In the first story, a young wife and mother receives release from a surprising source from the unbearable pain of losing her three children. In another, a young woman, in the aftermath of an unusual and humiliating seduction, reacts in a clever if less-than-admirable fashion.
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Other stories uncover the “deep-holes” in a marriage, the unsuspected cruelty of children, and how a boy’s disfigured face provides both the good things in his life and the bad. And in the long title story, we accompany Sophia Kovalevsky -- a late-nineteenth-century Russian émigré and mathematician -- on a journey that takes her from the Riviera, to Paris, Germany, and, Denmark, where she has a fateful meeting with a local doctor, and finally to Sweden, where she teaches at the only university in Europe willing to employ a female mathematician.
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Alice Munro renders complex, difficult events and emotions into stories that shed light on the unpredictable ways in which men and women accommodate and often transcend what happens in their lives.