What's so great about Alice Munro?

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!

Congratulations to Ms. Munro. Many excellent writers do not get the prize because the selection committee tends to shun controversy, but she is at least as deserving as the winners of the past.

<3 you baby if you're reading this lol xxx

heyyyyy way to go, alice, great work!!

i'm really pleased about this.

yeah this rules

nice little retirement present. beats a gold watch.

i think i'll let myself read a new story of hers to celebrate, i've been hoarding a pile of unread ones like silas marner but without the gloom.

wow cool that THE AMAZING RANDY writes for the onion now

http://www.theonion.com/articles/thunk-u-for-nobbel-prise-me-happie-now,34171/

nobel prizes for algernon.

haha yes i've had the newest book for awhile now and am putting off reading it, since it's probably the last one!

ex boyfriend just said her work was "overrated." How much do I pay bounty hunters?

Tell me one great Munro short story to read. I've never gotten through one.

"Floating Bridge"

Meanwhile, in Norway,
I've heard a buncha people complain about how the Nobel "once again" picked someone "no one has heard of." Wtf.
Quite a few of her books have been Norwegianed, for what it's worth.

Uh, I love "Englished" but "Norwegianed" was a lousy idea.

James Wood: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/10/alice-munro-our-chekhov.html