Featured Reading Guide
Alice Munro
Ranging from the 1850s through two world wars to the present, and from Canada to Brisbane, the Balkans and the Somme, these dazzling stories reveal the secrets of unconventional women who refuse to be contained.
Delicious
Digg
StumbleUpon
Reddit
FacebookAbout Alice Munro
Born in Canada, Alice Munro is the author of The Beggar Maid (shortlisted for the Booker Prize), one novel and six collections of short stories, most recently Open Secrets, which won the 1995 W. H. Smith Literary Award. She has twice won the Governor General’s Award, and her work appears regularly in the New Yorker. She lives in Ontario and British Columbia.
topAbout the Book
Ranging from the 1850s through two world wars to the present, and from Canada to Brisbane, the Balkans and the Somme, these dazzling stories reveal the secrets of unconventional women who refuse to be contained.
topAlice Munro interview/review
- What draws you to short stories as opposed to novels? What do you find that the shorter form enables you to do that a novel perhaps would not?
I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don’t obey the rules of progression for novels. I don’t think about a particular form, I think more about fiction, let’s say a chunk of fiction. What do I want to do? I want to tell a story, in the old-fashioned way—what happens to somebody—but I want that ‘what happens’ to be delivered with quite a bit of interruption, turnarounds, and strangeness. I want the reader to feel something is astonishing—not the ‘what happens’ but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.
- Where do you get the idea for a story or for a particular character?
Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story. Suppose you have—in memory—a young woman stepping off a train in an outfit so elegant her family is compelled to take her down a peg (as happened to me once), and it somehow becomes a wife who’s been recovering from a mental breakdown, met by her husband and his mother and the mother’s nurse whom the husband doesn’t yet know he’s in love with. How did that happen? I don’t know.
topStarting Points for Discussion
- Carried Away – What does Louisa’s taste in reading say about her character and how do books, and the act of reading, help, to shape the story?
- A Real Life – Millicent seems determined that Dorrie will go through with the wedding – what does marriage mean to Millicent, and in what ways does her idealised image of it differ from her own experience.
- The story The Albanian Virgin uses an uncongenial method of narration – how does the author use this device to enhance the mystery and do you think it works?
- The author leaves us in some doubt as to whether Charlotte is inventing the story of Lottie or recounting her own experiences. What is the purpose of this ambiguity? Do you believe Charlotte to be telling the truth?
- Most of the stories in this collection contain letters. What is the author’s purpose in using letters so often? What particular importance do they have?
- Many of the women in the stories seem to fine sex unpleasant, whiles still considering marriage to be the goal. Why do you think the author depicts the women responding to sex and motherhood in this way?
Other Books by Alice Munro
Carried Away
Set in her native southwest Ontario, they include Royal Beatings , in which…
Dance Of The Happy Shades
Alice Munro’s territory is the farms and semi-rural towns of south-western …
Friend Of My Youth
A woman haunted by dreams of her dead mother. An adulterous couple stepping …
Hateship, Friendship, Cou…
In these stories whole lives come into focus through single events or sudden…
Runaway
The matchless Munro makes art out of everyday lives in this dazzling new co…
Selected Stories
This first-ever selection of Alice Munro s stories sums up her genius. Her …
The Beggar Maid
Born into the back streets of a small Canadian town, Rose battled incessantly…
Suggested Further Reading
- Dressing Up for the Carnival ~ Carol Shields
- Dancing Girls ~ Margaret Atwood
- Cathedral ~ Raymond Carver
- The Collected Stories ~ Eudora Welty
- All the Day and Nights – Collected Stories ~ William Maxwell