What's so great about Alice Munro?

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

haha, this is great

Reading ten of her collections in a row has induced in me not a glow of admiration but a state of mental torpor that spread into the rest of my life. I became sad, like her characters, and like them I got sadder. I grew attuned to the ways life is shabby or grubby, words that come up all the time in her stories, as well as to people’s residential and familial histories, details she never leaves out. How many rooms are in the house, and what sort of furniture and who used to own it and what is everybody wearing? To ask these questions is to live your life like a work of realism.

feel like a lot of specific readings are questionable, and it's, i think, something like: one part stuff actually not-great about alice munro's fictional project to one part author of the article's lack of sympathy with the not-necessarily-in-their-own-terms-objectionable aspects of that project to one part the burnout inevitable if you read ten collections in a row (!) to one part munro's own slight decline over recent years

but still fun to see i guess

i like how mental torpor = being hyper-aware of your surroundings and asking lots of questions. he admits that he feels differently and sees the world differently after reading her work! she has an effect! and yeah you probably WOULD get really bummed out if you read ten collections in a row.

i don't think it would be any great shame for someone to just admit that they got bored of reading about small-town shabbiness in provincial Canada.

i don't think i actually read munro for the realism. i mean it feels real detail-wise, but what the hell do i know about canada in the 50's and 60's? not a whole hell of a lot. and i don't seek out tons of other writers who write about small town canadian life in the early and mid 20th century. that's not what i'm in it for. there are hundreds of decent regional writers. but i don't think people rave about her because of her expert eye for period detail.

that's not the same thing as reading her 'for the realism' tho

i don't even know what i was going on about. just wish that guy would look up the word torpor. as far as realism goes, i actually think part of munro's appeal for me is escapism. reading her is like following someone else's dream. but someone with interesting/entertaining dreams. most dreams are boring. and not worth following. i'm not a fan of dream novels. but i do like people who put me in another place that i would never be without them. and i don't care if that place is real or not. i guess that's the appeal of most writing. for me anyway. i mostly read sci-fi now for that reason.

in any case, a trained eye for detail is very much a part of what makes realism work but that is not what makes her stories work for me. a large part of what does make them work for me is going from point a to point b and being kinda blissfully unaware of how i got there. in the best cases. not everyone bats a thousand. you have to go with the flow of the river though. there is trust involved. if you don't like where she is taking you there are always chances to close the book.

mb this guy was forced to read all ten collections in some kind of clockwork orange style scenario

the stories blur if you read too many of'em at once but that's normal -- it happens every time I read a story collecction

^^^^^^^^

I gobble collections too quickly and I'm left with just an oconnorness or a carverness or a xueness or a barthelmeness or w/e, but how the hell else am I supposed to read?

Bum. She has announced she is retiring from writing.

i think its fine. she's 81. plus, i can imagine she'll write some more stuff anyway. kinda hard to stop if you've been doing it as long as she has.

the last collection seemed to imply this was the case, maybe, a little

but, yeah, i mean, good on her, i think?

I'm all in favour of people quitting while they're ahead--see E M Forster--I just want more good stuff because I'm greedy

Good for her. I've got enough Munro to reread the rest of my life.

not why forster quit iirc

only just saw this! sad news

Great profile in today's NY Times. Amazing that she published her first stories at age 37, in 1968.

Yep. She gives me hope. Prodigies are rare.

Nobel Prize!

WOOOOWWWWW

https://twitter.com/Nobelprize_org/status/388258838744297472

fuck yeah

this news makes me v happy

she deserves it!

Hurrah!