What's so great about Alice Munro?

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!

Get your hands on this immediately. It's cheap too!

i would but i've already got most of her other stuff :)

carried away is absolutely devastating. it was the first story i ever read of hers and, as much as i love her, i don't think i've read anything that has topped it.

i know right! i would agree w/ you that its definitely right near the top, amazes me how much she crams into that story

Having read everything else by her, I'm still holding off on Castle Rock. I fear she will die and I'll have nothing left to read of hers.

Reread "Carried Away," inspired by this thread. I didn't sort out the relationships, but I retained the memory of the letters Louisa received, and how the quiet authority of the last paragraph carries as much emotional weight as the conclusion to any novel.

A few of my favorite Munro stories:

Floating Bridge
Miles City, Montana
The Albanian Virgin
Save the Reaper
Turkey Season
Dimenions

'miles city, montana' is so so good. so is 'carried away'.

i think my favorite story of hers is 'nettles' from i think 'hateship...' which is just so perfect and real i can mistake it for my own memories

She had a new one in last week's New Yorker--haven't read it.

It's called "Gravel" and it's average.

Average for Munro (ie, still ace), or average for the rest of us (ie, just average)?

I thought it was better than basically every fiction story they published this year, but I'm a sucker for her stuff. Just bought the selected short stories.

I would never associate Alice Munro with romance or romanticism, but sometimes she so perfectly describes longing:

From carried away: He could no more describe the feeling he got from her than you can describe a smell. It’s like the scorch of electricity. It’s like burnt kernels of wheat. No, it’s like a bitter orange. I give up.

From comfort: Her memory of Ed Shore’s kiss outside the kitchen door did, however, become a treasure. When Ed sang the tenor solos in the Choral Society’s performance of the Messiah every Christmas, that moment would return to her. “Comfort Ye My People” pierced her throat with starry needles. As if everything about her was recognized then, and honored and set alight.

<3

She's got a story in the new Granta.

http://www.themillions.com/2012/07/a-beginners-guide-to-alice-munro.html#comments

ignore that. there are abt a million other websites that will give you a better intro

This woman should have won three Nobles by now.

Read Dolnick's essay about Munro that he published as a short ebook--it's OK, but mainly seems to consist of arguments about why short stories aren't as dumb as you think, which for someone like me who doesn't even think that made the whole enterprise a bit of a waste of time

r.i.p. lit crit

happy birthday, cutey.

https://sphotos.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash4/431093_10150638970355665_1200768662_n.jpg

Thanks for that pic, Scott--I was reading 'The View from castle Rock' over the weekend, and with its overt autobiographical stuff I was wondering what she looked like when young

It's the only one of hers I hadn't read yet--with her being quite old I 'd been holding off in case she died and there was nothing else new by her to read, but now I see there's a new book scheduled for later this year, so I can relax a bit

this is fun!

http://www.themillions.com/2012/07/a-beginners-guide-to-alice-munro.html

http://m.hollywoodreporter.com/news/hateship-friendship-wiig-steinfeld-pearce-379743

https://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn1/523488_10151148349010665_222119545_n.jpg

Pretty excited to read this!

oh word

review by michael robbins, one of america's best-selling poets:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/books/ct-prj-1118-alice-munro-dear-life-20121116,0,1117418.story

TNR's review.

>:O http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n11/christian-lorentzen/poor-rose

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