Alice Munro

Please join us in wishing Alice Munro a happy 88th birthday today! (Posted by the authors publisher)

"Millicent, who was shrewd and practical in some ways, was stubbornly sentimental in others. She believed always in the sweetness of affection that eliminated sex." --from "A Real Life" (1992) by Alice Munro

"People are curious. A few people are. They will be driven to find things out, even trivial things. They will put things together, knowing all along that they may be mistaken. You see them going around with notebooks, scraping the dirt off gravestones, reading microfilm, just in the hope of seeing this trickle in time, making a connection, rescuing one thing from the rubbish. And they may get it wrong, after all. I may have got it wrong." --from "Friend of My Youth" (1990) by Nobel Laureate Alice Munro

Something had come upon us that was even more unexpected and would become more devastating than the loss of income, though we didnt know it yet. It was the early onset of Parkinsons disease, which showed up when my mother was in her forties.

"For Alice Munro, Nobel laureate and master of the short story, breaking hearts and destroying tear ducts can be done in thirty pages or less; never more true than for her story Corrie, one of the stories in what shes announced is her final collection, appropriately titled Dear Life. Corrie follows a woman who may be meant for spinsterhood at twenty-six, falling in love with a married man. Of course, no one can fit in a twist like Munro, and the twist, the crime, the heartbreak will come in one swell and devastate even the strongest readers." -- CrimeReads

"Because if she let go of her grief even for a minute it would only hit her harder when she bumped into it again. And sometimes he thought she closed her eyes to hide a look of informed despair that it would not be good for him to see." from "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" (1999)

via The Atlantic

Happy 87th birthday to Alice Munro today.

Please join us in wishing Alice Munro a happy 87th birthday today!

I believe that it was only at the moment when I decided to come back, when I gave up the fight against my mother (which must have been a fight for something like her total surrender) and when in fact I chose survival over victory (death would have been victory), that I took on my female nature. --from "My Mothers Dream" by Alice Munro

Nobel Laureate Alice Munros seventh story collection FRIEND OF MY YOUTH was first published 28 years ago on this day in 1990.

Who do you consider your literary heroes? "Any woman who has to take an author photo where she looks the just-right amount of appealing is a literary hero. Beyond that, the short list: Truman Capote, Lorrie Moore, Dorothy Parker, Joan Didion, Richard Yates, Don DeLillo, Zadie Smith, Alice Munro, Guy de Maupassant, Katherine Anne Porter, George Saunders, Kazuo Ishiguro, Elizabeth Hardwick, Shirley Jackson (deep cut: read Jack the Ripper its the ultimate in bad date fiction), Katherine Mansfield, James Baldwin, Flannery OConnor, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Joyce and Yeats. As a rule, I like the Irish. I like the way they cope with their ghosts." -- Sloane Crosley

via Vanity Fair

Nobel Laureate Alice Munros acclaimed short story "The Office" is available as 99 ebook via Vintage Shorts.

Alice Munro short story in The New Yorker...

You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations. --from "Outsiders" included in OPEN SECRETS (1994)

There is a limit to the amount of misery and disarray you will put up with, for love, just as there is a limit to the amount of mess you can stand around a house. You cant know the limit beforehand, but you will know when youve reached it. I believe this. from THE MOONS OF JUPITER (1982) by Alice Munro

It seemed to me that winter was the time for love, not spring. In winter the habitable world was so much contracted; out of that little shut-in space we lived in, fantastic hopes might bloom. But spring revealed the ordinary geography of the place; the long, brown roads, the old cracked sidewalks underfoot, all the tree branches broken off in winter storms, that had to be cleared out of the yards. Spring revealed distances, exactly as they were. - from Lives of Girls and Women

"She was learning, quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood-- that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements." -- from FAMILY FURNISHINGS by Alice Munro

"Never underestimate the meanness there is in peoples souls....Even when they were being kindespecially when they were being kind." from THE LOVE OF A GOOD WOMAN by Nobel Laureate Alice Munro

Please join us in wishing Alice Munro a happy 86th birthday today!

Happy 86th birthday to Alice Munro.

"It was this way. They always carried the feed to the horses, pail by pail. In the winter, when the horses were in the stalls. So my father took the notion to carry it to them in the wheelbarrow. Naturally it was a lot quicker. But he got beat. For laziness. That was the way they were, you know. Any change of any kind was a bad thing. Efficiency was just laziness, to them. Thats the peasant thinking for you. from "Chaddeleys and Flemings: The Stone in the Field"

A new short story collection from Everymans Library, available today... "A man came along and fell in love with Dorrie Beck. At least, he wanted to marry her. It was true. If her brother was alive, she would never have needed to get married, Millicent said. What did she mean? Not something shameful." from A Real Life by Alice Munro included in WEDDING STORIES... A bouquet of great wedding storiesby turns funny, passionate, bittersweet, and romanticby famous writers from across the past two centuries. From F. Scott Fitzgerald to Lorrie Moore, and from Stephen Crane to Edwidge Danticat. The stories collected hereincluding such gems as Stephen Cranes The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, O. Henrys The Marry Month of May, F. Scott Fitzgeralds The Bridal Party, Joy Williamss The Wedding, and Lorrie Moores Thank You For Having Meencompass comic wedding mishaps, engagements broken and mended, honeymoon adventures, and scenes both heartwarming and heartbreaking. There are glamorous weddings in Paris and New York, and more eccentric ones in the Wild West and on a remote island beach. There are nervous brides, forgetful grooms, meddling guests, interrupted nuptials, second thoughts, and second chances. Above all, there are all kinds of peopleyoung and old, rich and poor, divorced and widowed, with or without childrenjoining together in the age-old quest for matrimonial happiness. READ an excerpt here: http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com//wedding-stories-by-edi/ (Posted by the authors publisher)

"The unhappiest moment I could never tell you. All our fights blend into each other and are in fact re-enactments of the same fight, in which we punish each otherI with words, Hugh with silencefor being each other. We never needed any more than that." from SOMETHING IVE BEEN MEANING TO TELL YOU

Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women (1971): "In Alice Munros novel about a young girl coming of age in in rural Ontario in the 1940s, the protagonist Del Jordans mother warns her that if she lets herself get distracted by a man, her life will never be her own. You will get the burden, a woman always does. Del replies glibly that there is birth control nowadays and rejects her mothers message that being female made you damageable. She resolves to live like men who are supposed to be able to go out and take on all kinds of experiences and shuck off what they didnt want and come back proud.

"Id like to think that there are lot of periods of happiness in the stories. Its all muddled up: happiness, sadness, depression, elation. As I said, the constant happiness is curiosity. I wouldnt set out to write a story that I thought was depressing, because that would depress me. But I notice that sometimes other peoples stories that I like very much are criticized as being depressing. -- Alice Munro in an interview

He never wanted to be away from her. She had the spark of life. From The Bear Came Over the Mountain by Alice Munro