What's so great about Alice Munro?

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

i've been wondering recently why munro seems so underexposed despite being so beloved. like, is it just that she writes in a relatively unpopular form (the short story)? how much does it have to do w/ her being a woman? or canadian i guess? (or am i just mistaken about her popularity?)

"or am i just mistaken about her popularity?"

this

maybe i need a more literary friend group

she definitely has fans in the u.s. (among literary types who have been reading her in the new yorker for years and her trade paperbacks are fairly ubiquitous and she always gets gushing reviews in newspapers so anyone who buys lit books based on those reviews has to know about her) and canada, but i don't know about elsewhere. my opinion is skewed though cuz i have lived in philly, marthas vineyard, and western mass for decades now and those places are filled with brainiacs who read a ton. but her rave newspaper reviews are nation-wide. i would say "college-educated New Yorker Magazine reader" would seem to be her target audience here BUT i think there is also book club crossover with her and i kinda can't believe Oprah never raved about her but maybe she did and i missed it.

also, yeah, short story collections one notch above new volumes of poetry as far as sales go probably. with some exceptions.

she is listed on oprah mag's fave women writers list:

http://www.oprah.com/oprahsbookclub/Favorite-Women-Writers/3

and she gets reviewed by francine prose in O mag:

http://www.oprah.com/omagazine/Too-Much-Happiness-by-Alice-Munro-Book-Review

she is way too subtle for an oprah bookclub choice

As much as anything, I became more aware of her as each Best American Short Stories annual, from the late 80s through the 90s, featured one and sometimes two of her stories, without a break in the run.

Would it shock y'all to know that Bret Easton Ellis thinks she's overrated?

http://i39.tinypic.com/ff48q0.png

http://stcommunities.straitstimes.com/show/2013/10/18/ill-health-keeps-canadian-author-alice-munro-nobel-ceremony

"Short story writer Munro, 82, revealed in 2009 that she had undergone coronary bypass surgery and had had cancer treatment."

http://25.media.tumblr.com/aa3ee53eb18c9323f19043a1b81aab70/tumblr_mutvbot7CZ1qb4dbmo1_500.jpg

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

― polymath & psychics club (Lamp),

otm. I had a similar response reading the late story "Fiction" in one sitting this morning. Wow. She has a talent for drawing circles around circles, and when I'm afraid she's spinning away from the center she pulls the circles together and tight.

yeah maybe it was on this board where someone described her stories as kind of starting in the middle and then expanding outward like tree rings

the retail person in me wants to know more about alice in her bookstore days.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FXU1priUUAA3wHj?format=jpg

my eyes are terrible. i see james joyce.

https://shortstorymagictricks.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/munro-alice-1965.jpg

i like the peek at her shelf. i feel like i'm spying.

i didn't even see that she had died! well, i'll be reading her for as long as i live. don't know if there is more that i can say. i used to say she was my favorite living writer. now i don't know what to say! she lived long. she wrote good.

Just reread “Family Furnishings”. Not much happens. Everything happens. A genius.