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Alice Munro

Autor(a) de Runaway

133+ Works 27,147 Membros 703 Críticas 191 Favorited

About the Author

Alice Munro was born Alice Laidlaw in Wingham, Ontario on July 10, 1931. She published her first story, The Dimensions of a Shadow, while a student at the University of Western Ontario in 1950. She left the university in 1951 to get married and start a family. In 1972 she became Writer in Residence mostrar mais at the University of Western Ontario. Her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, was published in 1968 and won the Governor General's Award, Canada's highest literary prize. Her other works include Lives of Girls and Women, The View from Castle Rock, Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You, Too Much Happiness, and Dear Life. She has received several awards including the Governor General's Award for fiction for Who Do You Think You Are? and The Progress of Love, the Giller Prize for Runaway in 2004, the Man Booker International Prize in 2009 for her lifetime body of work, and the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature. Her stories have appeared in numerous publications including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Atlantic Monthly. Also, in 2013, her title Dear Life: Stories made The New York Times Best Seller List. (Bowker Author Biography) mostrar menos
Image credit: Photo © Derek Shapton

Séries

Obras por Alice Munro

Runaway (2004) 3,671 exemplares
Dear Life (2012) 2,721 exemplares
Too Much Happiness (2009) 2,245 exemplares
The Love of a Good Woman: Stories (1998) 1,918 exemplares
Lives of Girls and Women (1971) 1,824 exemplares
The View from Castle Rock: Stories (2006) 1,655 exemplares
Open Secrets (1994) 1,484 exemplares
Selected Stories (1985) 1,334 exemplares
Friend of My Youth: Stories (1990) 1,099 exemplares
The Moons of Jupiter (1982) 983 exemplares
The Progress of Love (1986) 916 exemplares
Dance of the Happy Shades (1968) 716 exemplares
Vintage Munro (2004) 124 exemplares
My Best Stories (2009) 119 exemplares
New selected stories (2011) 62 exemplares
Queenie (1999) 46 exemplares
Lying Under the Apple Tree (2014) 46 exemplares
No Love Lost (2003) 25 exemplares
My Mother's Dream [short story] (1998) 24 exemplares
The Bear Came Over the Mountain (2005) 24 exemplares
Alice Munro Collection (2013) 18 exemplares
Dolly (2016) 9 exemplares
Scherzi del destino (2013) 7 exemplares
The Office (A Vintage Short) (2015) 4 exemplares
The Progress of Love / Death by Landscape (2010) — Contribuidor — 4 exemplares
Nettles 4 exemplares
Meneseteung 4 exemplares
Un Demi Pamplemousse (2002) 4 exemplares
Child's Play 3 exemplares
Amundsen 3 exemplares
Corrie 2 exemplares
What Is Remembered (Storycuts) (2011) 2 exemplares
Lost in Transmission 2 exemplares
The Turkey Season [short story] (1980) 2 exemplares
Sevgili Hayat (2014) 2 exemplares
Ksiezyce Jowisza (2014) 2 exemplares
El progreso del amor (1996) 2 exemplares
Boys and Girls 2 exemplares
Fiction (2013) 2 exemplares
Noveller (1993) 2 exemplares
Jawne tajemnice (2014) 2 exemplares
Fiction 2 exemplares
Bardon Bus 2 exemplares
Dimension 2 exemplares
Prue [short story] 2 exemplares
How I Met My Husband 2 exemplares
Trốn Chạy 1 exemplar
Sem título 1 exemplar
גלגולי האהבה (2018) 1 exemplar
Leaving Maverley 1 exemplar
In fuga 1 exemplar
Firar (2014) 1 exemplar
Genclik Arkadasim (2016) 1 exemplar
E SHTRENJTA JETE 1 exemplar
Odcienie milosci (2014) 1 exemplar
Přítelkyně z mládí (2021) 1 exemplar
Save the reaper 1 exemplar
Todo Queda En Casa (Ii) (2013) 1 exemplar
Free Radicals 1 exemplar
Munro Alice 1 exemplar
A Real Life 1 exemplar
81 Best Canadian Stories (1981) 1 exemplar
Miles City, Montana (1991) 1 exemplar
Utvalgte noveller (2004) 1 exemplar
Train 1 exemplar
Vandals (1994) 1 exemplar
Axis 1 exemplar
Wood 1 exemplar
Some Women 1 exemplar
Face 1 exemplar
Deep-Holes 1 exemplar
Wenlock Edge 1 exemplar

Associated Works

The Best American Short Stories of the Century (2000) — Contribuidor — 1,552 exemplares
Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules (2005) — Contribuidor — 1,211 exemplares
Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama (1995) — Contribuidor, algumas edições915 exemplares
The Best American Short Stories 2007 (2007) — Contribuidor — 825 exemplares
My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead (2008) — Contribuidor — 760 exemplares
The Best American Short Stories 2005 (2005) — Contribuidor — 693 exemplares
The Best American Short Stories 2008 (2008) — Contribuidor — 568 exemplares
The Best American Short Stories 2004 (2004) — Contribuidor — 556 exemplares
The Best American Short Stories 2006 (2006) — Contribuidor — 548 exemplares
The Best American Short Stories 2001 (2001) — Contribuidor — 543 exemplares
In the Stacks: Short Stories about Libraries and Librarians (2002) — Contribuidor — 531 exemplares
The Best American Short Stories 2002 (2002) — Contribuidor — 462 exemplares
The World of the Short Story: A 20th Century Collection (1986) — Contribuidor — 461 exemplares
The Best American Short Stories 1999 (1999) — Contribuidor — 449 exemplares
Points of View: Revised Edition (1966) — Contribuidor — 411 exemplares
Women & Fiction: Short Stories By and About Women (1975) — Contribuidor — 365 exemplares
The Best American Short Stories 2012 (2012) — Contribuidor — 358 exemplares
100 Years of the Best American Short Stories (2015) — Contribuidor — 282 exemplares
The Best American Short Stories 1993 (1993) — Contribuidor — 276 exemplares
The Best American Short Stories 2013 (2013) — Contribuidor — 274 exemplares
The Best American Short Stories 1992 (1992) — Contribuidor — 220 exemplares
The Best American Short Stories 1990 (1990) — Contribuidor — 218 exemplares
We Are the Stories We Tell (1990) — Contribuidor — 193 exemplares
The Best American Short Stories 1989 (1989) — Contribuidor — 188 exemplares
Nothing But You: Love Stories From The New Yorker (1997) — Contribuidor — 186 exemplares
The Best American Short Stories 1991 (1991) — Contribuidor — 183 exemplares
In Another Part of the Forest: An Anthology of Gay Short Fiction (1994) — Contribuidor — 174 exemplares
The Best American Mystery Stories 2008 (2008) — Contribuidor — 167 exemplares
The Best American Short Stories of the 80s (1990) — Contribuidor — 160 exemplares
The Best American Short Stories 1987 (1987) — Contribuidor — 129 exemplares
From Ink Lake: Canadian Stories (1990) — Contribuidor — 126 exemplares
Prize Stories 2001: The O. Henry Awards (2001) — Contribuidor — 123 exemplares
The Penguin Book of International Women's Stories (1996) — Contribuidor — 113 exemplares
The Best American Mystery Stories 2009 (2009) — Contribuidor — 112 exemplares
The Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English (1986) — Contribuidor — 111 exemplares
Norton Introduction to the Short Novel (1982) — Contribuidor, algumas edições98 exemplares
Prize Stories 1997: The O. Henry Awards (1997) — Contribuidor — 97 exemplares
The Best American Short Stories 1986 (1986) — Contribuidor — 97 exemplares
Granta 18: The Snap Revolution (1986) — Contribuidor — 90 exemplares
The Treasury of English Short Stories (1985) — Contribuidor — 84 exemplares
Granta 118: Exit Strategies (2012) — Contribuidor — 83 exemplares
Granta 120: Medicine (2012) — Contribuidor — 82 exemplares
Granta 17: While Waiting for a War (1985) — Contribuidor — 80 exemplares
The Ecco Book of Christmas Stories (2005) — Contribuidor — 73 exemplares
The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories (1986) — Contribuidor — 72 exemplares
Away from Her [2006 film] (2006) — Original short story — 67 exemplares
Literary Traveller: An Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction (1994) — Contribuidor — 54 exemplares
Great Canadian Short Stories (1971) — Contribuidor — 53 exemplares
Canadian Short Stories (1960) — Contribuidor — 44 exemplares
The Best American Short Stories 1981 (1981) — Contribuidor — 35 exemplares
The Secret Self: A Century of Short Stories by Women (1995) — Contribuidor — 33 exemplares
Stories To Get You Through The Night (2010) — Contribuidor — 32 exemplares
The Oxford Book of Stories by Canadian Women in English (1999) — Autor, algumas edições29 exemplares
Into the Widening World: International Coming-of-Age Stories (1995) — Contribuidor — 28 exemplares
The Best American Short Stories 1979 (1979) — Contribuidor — 25 exemplares
Best Short Stories 1991 (1991) — Contribuidor — 15 exemplares
Best Short Stories 1992 (1992) — Contribuidor — 13 exemplares
The Penguin Book of Modern Canadian Short Stories (1982) — Contribuidor — 12 exemplares
Inside Stories I (1987) — Contribuidor — 10 exemplares
A Vintage Christmas (Vintage Minis) (2018) — Contribuidor — 9 exemplares
Sixteen by twelve;: Short stories by Canadian writers (1970) — Contribuidor — 7 exemplares

Etiquetado

Conhecimento Comum

Membros

Discussions

March 2015: Alice Munro em Monthly Author Reads (Julho 2015)
Three Cheers for Alice Munro! em Canadian Bookworms (Outubro 2013)
Alice Munro em Book talk (Outubro 2013)

Críticas

Green trees behind the stars

Media Audio
Read by: Kimberly Farr, Arthur Morley
Length: 11 hrs and 40 mins

This collection of ten short stories was my introduction to Alice Munro. I was surprised at the diversity of her tales and I must confess I’m still not sure of her sub-genre. Too Much Happiness is a mixed bag.

My favorite story was Wood”, a story about a carpenter’s love of trees and the revival of his love for his wife after an accident in a forest’s edge. I was absolutely engrossed in the description of the trees, each type being described in the minute detail of their individual shape, bark color and texture, leaf and size. I felt like leaping out of bed and walking to Central Park to examine aspects of trees that I’ve never paid attention to. How could I have lived all these years and not looked?

I least-liked the title story. It’s five chapters and follows a 19th century scientist and her lover through her long trip from Russia to the French Riviera and back again. Had it been the first story I read I would most likely have marked the book as a DNF. I could not see the point of the rambling account, the characters were uninteresting, the events unremarkable, and the plot unintelligible.

Of the rest “Holes”, a story of a mother of whose eldest son drops out to live squats in Toronto, interested me more. More convincing than the title story it conveyed emotion and was anchored in a time and place that I can understand.

I have to believe that this collection is not representative of Munro’s writings. I would have preferred stories of equivalent length rather than the nine stories and a novella. I feel that I haven’t come to grips with this writer, but still look forward to reading more of her work. There is something there, but what is it?
… (mais)
½
 
Assinalado
kjuliff | 94 outras críticas | Mar 6, 2024 |
This is an always beautifully written, often deeply unpleasant, collection of stories that, with the exception of the last story, seem to me to be connected by a common tone that is designed to create a particular relationship with the reader. Alice Munro structures her narratives to capture the reader's curiosity and use it as tether for the imagination, herding the reader along at a pace in a direction not of their choosing.

Alice Munro could have used this path to get the reader to like, or at least sympathise with, the first-person narrators of these stories. She chooses not to.

Instead, she salts her prose with small, perfectly formed crystals of bitter understanding. She chooses to displace empathy with insight and the insights are most often into the actions and thoughts that most of us would not publicly want to admit to. Her narrators see the people around them and sometimes, albeit often in retrospect, with disturbing clarity, like a series of candid photographs, perfectly composed to capture the moment but with none of the mental softening of focus or deepening of colour that memory often provides.

Many of the stories are told by older narrators who describe the actions and emotions of their childhood or youth. This device is not used to create the cosy feel of a 'Let me share my story' narrative that is understood to have the veracity of a story that starts 'Once Upon A Time'. Instead, it is used to produce two specific effects on the reader: to defer judgment and to become complicit in the narrator's worldview.

The deferment of judgment is promoted by the implication that the older person now telling the tale may think and behave differently than her younger self and so the person now should not be judged for what the person then did. This plea for a deferment of judgment is bolstered by reminding the reader that 'These were different times and we all behaved differently then.' implying that the narrator should not be held to account for doing or saying or thinking what everyone else did.

Then, if the reader does defer judgment, suspending the reactions their values and beliefs would normally prompt, the more subtle argument is slipped into the reader's mind like a whisper in the ear from the narrator. The whisper goes something like: 'We were all monstrous as children. You'd know that if you let yourself remember honestly'. followed by the more insidious 'And even as adults, we still harbour those hates and prejudices, we've just learned not to let them show'. Until, as story after story rolls by, the reader is pushed to conclude 'This is how people were and are. If you're honest, you'll recognise that you are like this too',

Perhaps I'm projecting this intent onto the text. But then, that's part of what a reader of fiction is supposed to do.

Dimensions

What a hard-hitting but still hopeful story. Not much happiness anywhere in sight. Desperation. Grief. Insanity. Irretrievable loss. And yet, a refusal to stop there. To be trapped there. To let that be all."

Fiction

Some of this escapes me. I was swept along in the narrative of part 1 and then made to reset levels of intensity and curiosity when I was dumped into part 2 which took place years later and with less passion. Seeing Part 1 revisited through the lens of a fiction based on a child's memory was disorientating. The ending was so suspended I haven't landed yet

Wenlock Edge

A disconcerting story. The gap between the dispassion of the telling, especially in a first-person account - and the intensity of the experience was unsettling. It kept me focused on the young woman discovering what she was willing to do when asked rather than the old man with the strange needs.

Her self-discovery was not a momentary epiphany but rather a clinical analysis of her own actions and emotions. It contained neither fear nor joy, It was a 'So that's what I'm capable of' statement. It didn't ignore the damage she'd sustained during the experience but rather catalogued as the price of choosing transgression.

The 'Wenlock Edge' title, referring to the Housman poem the girl is asked to read aloud, got me thinking about how the story was told. Although it was a first-person account, it was told by an older woman looking back on her younger self. Enough time had passed that she details of how much things cost and what kind of foods were served were presented as period oddities, It made me wonder if, as she told this tale, she felt herself to be standing on Wenlock Edge seeing her own earlier troubles as "Are ashes under Uricon".

Deep Holes

A depressing story, perhaps because, with one exception, it felt like the description of an ordinary, what-more-can-you-expect? life. The exception was the MC's eldest son, who falls into more than one type of deep hole. her husband also seemed to live in a deep hole that he only occasionally emerged from. Her joy in a single portion of lasagne - tastes good and with no waste - read like an epitaph.

Free Radicals

This is the first story that I didn't believe. It felt too contrived to be real. Scenes worked. There were strong themes. But it felt like a collage thrown together. I did like the observations on grief and the ambiguity of the ending.

Face

I didn't get this story.

I liked the main character's voice - a theatrical man born at the start of the 20th Century looking back on his troubled youth.

He rambled a bit, both in content and timeline but I put that down to his personality.

The content of the story, particularly what the little girl did and how the boy reacted when he found out, was vivid and unpleasant.

But what was the point of all that pain?

Some Women

This story is filled with sharp little slivers of spite that slide into the memory like splinters into a fingertip. The prose is scalpel, sharp and used with precision. The story is mostly unpleasant, the sort of thing it feels wrong to be reading about for pleasure, but the narrative pull is strong and the tone is deceptively passive so soon, the reader finds themselves complicit in the unwrapping, the disrobing of these relationships.

If O'Henry had written this story, it would have come across as a romantic affirmation of love. As Alice Munro tells it, through the memory of a woman now grown old but then young, it is instead a story of all the things that people don't say, of disguised intent, of temptation and manipulation, of a contest of wills and of young girl assessing the women around her, neither kindly nor with malice but with a determination to see what is there and not what she is being shown.

Child's Play

Another story with a woman in her sixties remembering her childhood self. This one captures the instinctual aggressions and aversions of childhood, the magical thinking of a mind not yet rational and the ease with which very young children shed their former selves each year like a snake sloughing off a skin.

I admired the skill of the slow reveal, which generated a sense that the outcome, no matter how disturbing, was, if not inevitable, then at least unsuprising.

What I liked most about the story was the main character's refusal of the possibility of absolution or atonement. She is someone who knows that what has been done cannot be undone and that some burdens cannot be set down.

Wood

This story didn't work for me. I couldn't connect with this man. He was locked into his head in a non-verbal way that I found impenetrable. I could see that there was probably an extended metaphor about how even the most isolated tree in a forest is still connected in complex ways to the forest but I couldn't get any traction with it.

Too Much Happiness

The parts of this story that dealt with how the main character thought about things enthralled me but through most of the story, I felt I was skating through a landscape that I couldn't quite bring into focus. I have only a superficial knowledge of the historical context of the story, which wasn't enough for me fully to understand what was going on a lot of the time.
… (mais)
 
Assinalado
MikeFinnFiction | 94 outras críticas | Mar 1, 2024 |
 
Assinalado
libq | 70 outras críticas | Feb 19, 2024 |
Modern Classic
 
Assinalado
BooksInMirror | 22 outras críticas | Feb 19, 2024 |

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Estatísticas

Obras
133
Also by
67
Membros
27,147
Popularidade
#762
Avaliação
3.9
Críticas
703
ISBN
865
Línguas
31
Marcado como favorito
191

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