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Synopsis
This collection of stories--28 of them, from all phases of Alice Munro's career--include many of her most famous but also a few unexpected choices. Among them are the early stories "Walker Brothers Cowboy" and "Dance of the Happy Shades;" "The Beggar Maid," "Fits," and "Lichen" from Munro's middle period; and "Carried Away," "The Progress of Love," "The Albanian Virgin," "A Wilderness Station," and "Vandals" from more recent collections. As always, Munro writes about ordinary people living ordinary lives in the towns and cities and rural areas of Canada.
| Size | | Height: | 8.0 in | | Width: | 5.3 in | | Thickness: | 1.2 in | | Weight: | 19.2 oz |
Industry Reviews
"This is what all art seeks: a coming to terms. What Munro achieves, and what she offers to her readers, is a vantage from which such a consummation feels possible."
Los Angeles Times Book Review - Kate Phillips (10/13/1996)
"It is a rare pleasure, in this era of fast-cut, fragmented fiction, to read short stories that take their time."
Boston Book Review - Elizabeth Shostak
"These stories are sobering, even disturbing. They are not remotely sentimental. But they remind the reader--and this volume is intended for the reader not yet familiar with this author--that it is not necessary to make a splash or to strike an attitude. Absolute sobriety, and the stealth required to make it look natural, will always occupy the higher ground."
Spectator - Anita Brookner (11/09/1996)
"...Alice Munro...has never been in fashion....[Her] risk-taking is a quiet business and her imaginative investigation of people's lives is offset by an almost perverse discretion....These stories are anything but melodramatic....The characteristic Munro protagonist is a woman, not beautiful but attractive, not brilliant but clever, who searches for patterns underlying her experience but sees that they have to authority to explain it."
Times Literary Supplement - Adam Mars-Jones (11/08/1996)
"Alice Munro is no purveyor of sunny platitudes. These are hard, clear, tough tales, evoking the sorrow and the homely cruelties of life in a harsh place. Her people seem both familiar and strange in ways that recall some of the characters of Carson McCullers and Richard Ford."
New York Review of Books - John Banville (02/20/1997)
"Munro has been called, with good reason, North America's Chekhov. Her rich elaborations of seemingly commonplace lives, in which she invariably locates the imaginative heart of lives her characters wished and meant to have lived, have grown in power and complexity over the years, to the point where the best stories in her 1994 volume 'Open Secrets'...have placed her in serious contention for both the Nobel Prize and for the designation of best living short-story writer."
Fenno
"[The later stories], in their freedom of range, their intricately arranged surprises and their historical imagination, are like few others. One must go back to Tolstoy's 'Hadji Murad' and Chekhov's 'In the Ravine' for comparable largeness; of contemporary story writers, only the Mark Helprin of 'A Dove of the East' comes to mind....As well as a spirited, acutely perceptive tale-teller, Munro is an implacable destiny-spinner, whose authorial voice breaks into her fiction like that of a God who can no longer bear to keep quiet."
Updike
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