Details
Synopsis
The eight long stories in Alice Munro's 11th collection (2004) include three featuring a woman named Julie Henderson ("Chance," "Soon," and "Silence") that, together, comprise a poignant life story. The other stories are "Passion," "Trespasses," "Tricks," "Powers," and the astonishing title story, which is about a woman who is tortured by her marriage but unable to leave it. As she does so often, Munro writes about women who would like to run away but who either can't, or won't, or finally do--only to discover disaster or boredom. Named by the New York Times as one of the 10 best books of 2004.
| Size | | Length: | 335 pages | | Height: | 7.5 in | | Width: | 5.5 in | | Thickness: | 0.8 in | | Weight: | 8.8 oz |
Publisher's Notes
First Line: "RUNAWAY
Carla heard the car coming before it topped the little rise in the road that around here they called a hill. It's her, she thought."
Industry Reviews
"[Munro] continues to perfect her virtuosic formula....While her style typifies the traditionally realistic, often domestic genre..., Munro's stories are also global, big-hearted and warm....One never knows quite where a Munro story will end, only that it will leave an incandescent trail of psychological insight."
Publishers Weekly (10/11/2004)
"Alice Munro has a strong claim to being the best fiction writer now working in North America....What makes Munro's growth as an artist so crisply and breathtakingly visible...is precisely the familiarity of her materials. look what she can do with nothing but her own small story; the more she returns to it, the more she finds....More than any writer since Chekhov, Munro strives for and achieves, in each of her stories, a gestaltlike completeness in the representation of a life....Reading Munro puts me in that state of quiet reflection in which I think about my own life: about the decisions I've made, the things I've done and haven't done, the kind of person I am, the prospect of death. She is one of the handful of writers, some living, most dead, that I have in mind when I say that fiction is my religion....Basically, RUNAWAY is so good that I don't want to talk about it here. Quotation can't do the book justice, and neither can synopsis. The way to do it justice is to read it."
New York Times Book Review - Jonathan Lethem (11/14/2004)
"There are no happy endings here, but neither are these tales tragedies. They are constructions of calm perplexity, coolly observed human mysteries....The thrilling unexpectedness of real life, which Munro rightly insists on, will in her hands keep a reader glued....There seems nothing missing in this yet again brilliant collection....Someone writing at this level well into her seventies...is a literary inspiration in itself."
Atlantic Monthly - Lorrie Moore (12/01/2004)
"The conflicts between the needs of daughters and the desires of frustrated mothers, between the needs of mothers and the desires of brilliant daughters, may be perennial and irreconcilable, but we can rejoice that at seventy-three Alice Munro is still exploring them with such unflinching honesty and such undiminished power."
Literary Review - Elaine Showalter (02/01/2005)
"Munro's sphere of inquiry is both narrow and deep: she knows the larger world because she has taken it on herself to know herself. And because she is someone of prodigious drive and gifts--of intelligence and sensitivity, curiosity and imagination--what she produces is always worth paying attention to."
London Review of Books - Mary Hawthorne (02/17/2005)
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