What's so great about Alice Munro?

Actually, I pretty much would, though Carver and Cortazar would be a little lower than the others. I went for my first three mainly becuase of the sheer size of their output, as well as its quality.

she's my favorite writer i've discovered over the last two or three years. she is unbelievably great. my only complaint (in the middle of a story) is she has these *moments*. but then she does amazing things with the moments. but then i wonder, are moments really like that?

but then i think she knows this, and she uses these moments to illuminate everything.

<3 <3 <3

cosign 1000%

i've been getting really into her work the last 6 months, and 'open secrets' is the greatest short story collection i've ever read. scott totally otm: she's so elegant, and there's not a wasted word, and such a natural flow to her prose. i like that a lot of her stories have these sinister undertones.

The short story writer I've most imitated, ever since I read "The Albanian Virgin" fifteen years ago. I've taught "Royal Beatings," "Floating Bridge," and "The Turkey Farm" quite a bit. The seemingly artless manner in which incidents accumulate, illuminated by the perceptions of an older narrator, always astonishes me.

i wld say pretty much everything

stayed up l8 last nite reading all of &cship, marriage feeling bewildered by something so great. the last story is just ...damn but there were a few others the one that opens the collection and the one with the golf course "nettles" are so n/l i kind of want to talk about them like physical effects like something that happened 2 me

idk maybes its kind of like that franzen review/meltdown theres no way to talk about her stories just u have 2 read them but... idk. my head is filled w/ them

also what should i read next i bought lives of girls and women and open secrets and id already read runaway and dance of the happy shade. recs plz

the only other one i've read is moons of jupiter - i think that's what it's called? anyway it's awesome but yeah i would like some recs too

i wonder, are moments really like that?

The fact that she has you wondering means that, within the universe of the story she is telling, she was able to convince you of their reality. That is part of her storytelling art.

The fact that, after laying down the book, you have lingering doubts about the reality of those moments means to me that she is probably placing an exaggerated throw-weight into those instants, in order to increase their immediate impact on the reader. A writer like Henry James would arrange such moments so that their impact grew in retrospect.

This is a rather small weakness in my opinion, but it is a gauge as well.

no one ever tells me anything so i went to the bookstore and bought a bunch of her books all at once gathered up the slim gray volumes and read through them v. quickly all wknd @ the beach

*spoiler*

at the end of lives of girls women which has the best title when the girl sleeps with the dude from the lumberyard and fails her exams daydreaming of sweat and pleasure i felt kind of angry with her like she was such a fool but i *think* i wasnt supposed to or at least i should i *get* what she was doing what was really impt &c

still i felt sad and irked by her

the collection with "Save The Reaper!" (published in '98) is marvelous.

To be honest I can't really recommend any one in particular--every one of her books (haven't yet read the most recent) struck me as being pretty bloody excellent.

Open Secrets is a good starting place. Or Hateship, Friendship...

but, yeah, just dive in.

though maybe don't start with The View From Castle Rock just cuz it's a little different. combining historical autobio stuff with fictional stuff.

(i mention those two books - Open Secrets and Hateship...just cuz i feel like they contain one knockout punch after another.)

yeah hateship is all killer no filler although still MAYBE not as a good as runaway

moons of jupiter has a couple of really fantastic ones too... "hard luck stories" is like a vision or a song or something idk

The thing I think is really startling about her is her descriptions which are eerily precise and cliché-free.

yah she really "captures it," as they say

new book out later this year!!

i luv munroe

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_6hDZt1e0ofY/SYx69iz66mI/AAAAAAAADT0/dPnDpZBnOxI/s320/jim-j-bullock.jpg

the penguin classics covers are amazing:

http://img.amazon.ca/images/I/41V377QRHBL._SL500_AA240_.jpg
http://img.amazon.ca/images/I/51hlVD4wUzL._SL500_AA240_.jpg
http://img.amazon.ca/images/I/41QAT49B1DL._SL500_AA240_.jpg
http://img.amazon.ca/images/I/41EF0SFENYL._SL500_AA240_.jpg
http://img.amazon.ca/images/I/513YKKJrmeL._SL500_AA240_.jpg
http://img.amazon.ca/images/I/415A6QDNDEL._SL500_AA240_.jpg
http://img.amazon.ca/images/I/4141QK017FL._SL500_AA240_.jpg

Stock photos of self-conscious women. Fitting?

the ones with faces seem out of place.

idk i think theyre waaaay nice than stock photos are mb i just like the stock photo aesthetic

the girl in "there's something..." is mesmerizing to me

The new collection is her best since Hateship...

there's only been one other btw them (?) which is my absolute favorite of hers. although there's something i've been menaing to tell you has the story about the dude that tries to walk on water.

Yeah, they're lovely. I thought they were Hoppers for a minute

I believe they're not stock, but were taken especially for the books.

Alice Munro is like the female northern version of William Faulkner.

o_0

there's only been one other btw them (?)

Runaway
The View From Castle Rock

Oh they're def not stock

woo a copy of 'hateship, friendship' showed up at work today, i can read this person now

you will love it (maybe)

hateship is a good place to start, it's pretty much amazing

Yup.

i really like those penguin classics covers, why do they not have them over here

picked up 'open secrets' & 'the love of a good woman', half way thru the latter now. kinda wonder what im going to do when i run out of her books, i always love knowing that theres more of them to read

I know! I've only got Castle Rock left unread, and I'm trying to hold off on that until she gets a new one out, so that I won't be without something to live for.

i just looked on wikipedia + ive got 6 more to go which is a relief

hahaha this was exactly my thinking, but then i got greedy and read the last 3 in recent months ;_;

haha i think in a two month period last summer i read eight of her books i think they sustained me

some of her stories so many of them really are like a long swim in the ocean you come out of them feeling refreshed & born anew

yes.

luckily for me, although i read super fast, i retain close to 0%, so i'm looking forward to rereading her entire back catalogue.

when i read 'runaway' it was summer and i was staying in a cabin on a farm in oregon and the landscape suited the stories really well.

estela do you think a lot of settings/characters have a distinctly new-zealandy feel to them?

*a lot of HER

yes i do, sometimes anyway. not so much with stories set in the past; i think there are religious differences between canadian olden days people and nz olden days people, which has a strong bearing on the characters. her writing is not like new zealand writing though, her extreme talent aside, her work can be dark and menacing but she's not gloomy in the way of nz writing.

just reading 'open secrets' for the first time + man... carried away - thats a story right there

is that the one with "The Albanian Virgin"? Good stuff.

yes it is!

*when I could listen to

haha absolutely

For me, it comes down to if I can enjoy the artwork without the Bad Things the artist has done intruding into my brain.

I know Marvin Gaye was a shit, but I can listen to him without thinking about it for whatever reason.

I can't listen to any Michael Jackson, because I start thinking about abused kids. I can't listen to the Jackson 5, because I think about the little kid singing who would grow up and abuse kids.

If the person is an active, living artist, I don't want my money going to them if they are an abuser.

I had never heard of Alice Munro before this. I love a good short story so I'm tempted based on what was said about her earlier in this thread. And she's dead, so it's not like she's benefiting off of me reading her works. But it sounds like the abuse echoes in the content of her stories, so I probably won't bother.

i always wonder how much i should even know about someone. before the internet i didn't really read much about artists and their lives. i mean, i did, but i don't think i ever learned too much that was scandalous. i read hollywood babylon. but for the most part i didn't seek out juicy tidbits. didn't read a lot of biographies. i liked the mystery of artists. i was always very uncomfortable meeting my heroes.

I know Marvin Gaye was a shit, but I can listen to him without thinking about it for whatever reason.

when i listen to marvin gaye i *do* think about how his entire life was fucked and doomed and how much he inflicted that on others... doesn't interfere with how much i love the music for whatever reason

i tried relistening to early red house painters a few months ago because it was my birthday and that stuff is the core, the heart music to me, but the experience was mostly miserable (how many of those songs are about abusive relationships???). i put on the golden age by american music club after and it was like breathing air again

Idk for me it’s like, art isn’t something that springs out of nowhere, with the person producing a mere conduit. The art is the person. If you don’t know anything about that person, the art will give you some kind of story about them. But once you know some truths about that person, well then it’s not just the art giving you their story, but now their story is influencing how you see their art.

I’m not good at talking about this stuff, sorry. Props to map for being so articulate.

so many great artists seem to be psycopaths lmao, better imho to have other heroes xp

i think your posts about this have really clarified how this stuff affects me, just1n3, as i really suck at talking about it

haha thx justine! hi ivy!

i think i get most depressed when i realize the art only exists so the artist could have access to more people to abuse. (obv we are talking way beyond alice munro now)

There's part of me that wants to spend more time with their work, seeing what made their life not completely wasted or toxic. It's a more magnified version of, say, knowing a pastry chef who's an asshole (I've known a few!) but appreciating what they make because it's their most generous, least fucked-up part.

People who take their own lives...that's where I land closer to what a lot of you are describing here with Munro. It takes a lot for me not be distracted by that, or to see the work as a reflection of that dark impulse.

that's an interesting pov.

Idk for me it’s like, art isn’t something that springs out of nowhere, with the person producing a mere conduit. The art is the person.

You're not having any trouble explaining yourself pithily.

For me I guess when that happens, I see the art as an honest journal of their own life, and it's one that I have to look at with some measure of respect for what they went through. When you have musicians for example who tell stories full of empathy or longing, and meanwhile they're sliding into the DMS of underage fans or something, it just feels like sensitive guy bait meant to lure people in.

So much male '70s soft rock codes in that fashion.

i learned something about an artist whose most famous work was not only profoundly influential for me aesthetically, thematically, etc. but which was likely instrumental in me figuring out i was a trans lesbian, a work that if i ever actually start writing my n*vel it will inevitably be compared to, and what i learned about him suggested that he had not actually internalized the themes of his own work, which is just..... *siiiiiigh*. but it also makes me think about how i expect to hear something unsettling about ***** ***** one day, despite the fact that his best work prioritizes female subjectivity even as its being undermined and abused and destroyed by men, and i think about how artists are often working through nigh-unconscious guilts and regrets in their work, and the art does not, cannot make up for the harm they caused others, but that it doesn't exactly nullify the usefulness of the art and the degree to which it helped me realize things about myself. idk, i think i can read alice munro in the future under these conditions but it's always fraught, unknowable until i get there

Or I don't know things start to come off as justifications for the harm done to other people. And yeah they code as the sort of wistful explanations of the complexities of being a man, and yet why do such complexities lead to them wanting to have a specific, simpleminded pattern of abuse they return to over and over again. Obviously that's just the most common one, there are other forms of abuse or abhorrent views from all genders. Xxp

Xps thanks, I really appreciate that bc ilxors are generally highly articulate and I get self conscious about being much less able to say what I want to say.

I’m a notorious grudge-holder so it’s pvmic for me to renounce my admiration of an artist once I find out they’ve really hurt someone/s. But it’s not the kind of standard I think everyone should have. And if you’ve benefited from the influence of an artist’s work, the way ivy describes, then i especially understand that and respect it.

I was a total die-hard for the Pumpkins until I found out about Billy corgan’s association with alex jones. I happily ignored all the goofy-ass pretentious shit he said before that. Now I just can’t take him seriously. But I still regularly listen to those pre-2000 albums because that music was a gateway for me, and got me through my awful teenage years.

my w1fe told me several years ago that she noticed one of her favorite indie musicians was following all sorts of MAGA accounts, Candace Owens and that type of person, she saw her commenting with "vomit" emojis on some BLM content, etc. she told me this as this artist's most recent, long awaited second album was in the mail. i quietly returned it.

The 500 songs podcast, while awesome, is very dispiriting when so many of those people were awful.

At least we’ll always have Fats Domino and Otis Redding, certified good guys.

i think a lot of successful fiction writers get really good at shutting out the real world/people/irl emotions in order to live in the world they are creating on the page. which is why so many of them have so many wifes/husbands/girlfriends/boyfriends. people get tired of being shut out.
i can remember even my part-time writing used to bum maria out pretty bad because i would shut myself off so completely. i couldn't go back and forth from real world to writing world. i had to stay in the zone. i can only imagine what it would have been like if i was a full-timer.
i also think this can lead to writers getting good at just shutting things out in their real lives that is uncomfortable or hard. or maybe that's just people in general. using their work to avoid things.

so, yes, what i'm saying is that being a full-time writer can make you more sociopathic. haha. i mean its kinda true. i do remember (and i miss) that feeling of writing something long and being really into it and nothing else mattered to me. the world didn't matter. people didn't matter. i liked that feeling!

would anyone prefer to have not learned of this? or is it important to know (even though she’s dead)?

(nb i’m not at all suggesting that the victims should have kept quiet or anything!)

lurking - just wanted to say thx for this discussion it is v helpful to read. between this and the Gaiman stuff it all has really put me into a bad place

I think it's hugely important to know, first because it was important for the daughter to tell, but also because it's impossible to ignore such an event if you want to analyse someone's work.

Otherwise, I think the point of experience is true but it can go different ways. I have heard stories of abuse from people close to me that happened fairly recently, that are close at hand. And always with some people knowing and shutting up. Canada 1976 is pretty far in comparison, even if the letter is already much closer. There is always outrage when you read such, but it is somewhat detached, more part of some great misery.

Even if it feels wrong to compare or order suffering obviously

A complex essay from Brandon Taylor:

What I love about her stories is that they come with an aftermath. They dare to offer the reader a glimpse into that rarely seen world to come. When the choice has been made and one has to get on with it. I was told too late. I loved him too much. Is that not the most Alice Munro thing you have ever read?

Furthermore, it’s a kind of thinking I was raised among. It’s how I got through much of the abuse and trauma of my own life. Well, that’s that. Anyway. Not a shrug. But a setting the shoulder against the stone and pushing onward. It is a kind of thinking common to the rural poor and the working poor, among whom and by whom I was raised. I have struggled for a long time in trying to explain it. It is a world without history. Not a world without a past. But a world without a history, which is a story we tell ourselves about the past. Among my people, the rural and working poor, to make a history out of the past is taboo. To speak of a thing done is to make too much of it. To be fishing for sympathy, and for what, when there’s nothing to be done about it anyway.

makes her stories sound less appealing than i remember

These abuse situations, where a parent fails to protect their child, can often have nuance that at least leads to some sympathy for the parent’s position.

But Munro straight up treated the situation like she’d been cheated on. And tbh this story has some parallels to my relationship with my mother so that’s probably why I have a pretty black and white reaction to it. My own mother *accused me* - not gently inquired with concern - of having an affair with my stepdad when I was 16 (fyi there was nothing like that happening) and it permanently damaged not just my relationship with her but also my stepdad.

wow complex is right. but useful too? thx for sharing, really intense food for thought

she did leave at first. alice munro. after her daughter told her what had happened. but then went back to him. i don't know how long she left for.

gotta figure she was the victim of some kind of gaslighting and abuse as well, it makes sense bc you get the sense that this guy was a smooth-talker who intellectualized his toxicity, made it poetic, acknowledged his flaws and his imperfections, tied everything up in a nice little bow, and would love to get into just how unfair it was to hold him to impossible standards, how in being a fallible man prone to what all men are prone to, he was taken advantage of by a duplicitous female. her returning to him is something you see a lot of victims do, people who have been tied up in horrible relationships for so long, justifying not just what's done to them but done to others. not that it excuses what she did to her own daughter whatsoever, plenty of people out there would have fled the situation, or killed the fucking guy.

yeah i suspect a.m. was damaged by abuse earlier in life too. people who have been abused tend to stick with abusers later on. the thing about accusing a 12-year-old of being a homewrecker and a sexual threat, that kind of damage, you only do that if it was done to you once upon a time and you haven't dealt with it afaict. my experience is similar to justine's in that my mother was the one who was treated like that, and she was sexually abused pretty heavily, by her father. she didn't reckon with it, she was in great pain, but ultimate she chose the side of her abuser and was very emotionally abusive, cruel, and narcissistic to me. thank god she didn't abuse me sexually. the rest of that side of the family, that kind of thing of sexually weaponizing minors in order to justify the abuse of men, that was definitely happening with cousins and so forth. anyway that's where i'm coming from when it comes to this story so it's impossible for me to see straight about it. i have nothing against anyone who continues to read and enjoy a.m., in fact i'm maybe a little jealous haha. but there's always joy williams :). i think she runs an animal sanctuary in wyoming or something, i'm pretty sure she's safe.

basically if you've internalized "i am worthless" it's very easy for you to treat others esp your own children like they are worthless too.

I find Brandon Taylor's supreme confidence in the value of his thoughts, and the lesser value of other people's thoughts, annoying as usual.

A certain "There's no right way to think about this, but my way is the rightest" kind of vibe

“Before Alice Munro's husband sexually abused his stepdaughter he targeted another 9-year-old girl. Munro “suspected that her husband might have raped and murdered [12 yr old] Lynne Harper.” It’s increasingly clear that Alice Monro was a sociopath savant.https://t.co/zdgvt0kS58 pic.twitter.com/G9oqqUvaRn

— Tabatha Southey (@TabathaSouthey) August 3, 2024

what the fuck is a "sociopath savant"?

the fuck even knows