WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE® IN LITERATURE 2013
A New York Times Notable Book
A Washington Post Notable Work of Fiction
A Best Book of the Year: The Atlantic, NPR, San Francisco Chronicle, Vogue, AV Club
In story after story in this brilliant new collection, Alice Munro pinpoints the moment a person is forever altered by a chance encounter, an action not taken, or a simple twist of fate. Her characters are flawed and fully human: a soldier returning from war and avoiding his fiancée, a wealthy woman deciding whether to confront a blackmailer, an adulterous mother and her neglected children, a guilt-ridden father, a young teacher jilted by her employer. Illumined by Munro’s unflinching insight, these lives draw us in with their quiet depth and surprise us with unexpected turns. And while most are set in her signature territory around Lake Huron, some strike even closer to home: an astonishing suite of four autobiographical tales offers an unprecedented glimpse into Munro’s own childhood. Exalted by her clarity of vision and her unparalleled gift for storytelling, Dear Life shows how strange, perilous, and extraordinary ordinary life can be.
Editorial Reviews
One of the great short story writers not just of our time but of any time.“ –The New York Times Book Review
„Wise and unforgettable. Dear Life is a wondrous gift; a reminder of why Munro’s work endures.“ –The Boston Globe
„Unquestionable evidence of her unfaded abilities. . . . Reading these stories will tell you something about Alice Munro’s life, but it will tell you more about Alice Munro’s mind–and, not entirely surprisingly, this proves to be even more compelling.“ –The New Republic
„Alice Munro is not only revered, she is cherished. . . . Dear Life is as rich and astonishing as anything she has done before.“ –The New York Review of Books
„There is no writer quite as good at illustrating the foibles of love, the confusions and frustrations of life or the inner cruelty and treachery that can be revealed in the slightest gestures and changes of tone. . . . The stories of Dear Life violate a host of creative writing rules, but they establish yet again Munro’s psychological acuity, clear-eyed acceptance of frailties and mastery of the short story form.“ –The Washington Post
„Alice Munro demonstrates once again why she deserves her reputation as a master of short fiction.“ –O, The Oprah Magazine
„Exquisite. . . . No other author can tell quite so much with quite so little. The modest surfaces of Munro’s lapidary sentences conceal rich veins of ore.“ –Chicago Tribune
„Munro’s wonderfully frank and compassionate stories suggest that perseverance, the determination to keep at the work of living, can invest a life with dignity through the end of one’s days.“ –San Francisco Chronicle
„Absorbing. . . . Most haunting of all are the four autobiographical sketches that end the book, which display Munro’s gift of observation and ability to trace big emotional arcs in short brushstrokes.“ –Entertainment Weekly
„Munro’s best collection yet.“ –The Philadelphia Inquirer
„Remarkable. . . . Masterfully evokes the relationship between people and the places they inhabit.“ –Time Out New York
„Munro has an uncanny knack of convincing the reader that the characters have real lives before the stories commence and continuing existences after. . . . This is simply a good writer doing what she loves.“ –The Guardian (London)
„In acknowledging Alice Munro’s pre-eminence in the world of contemporary short fiction it’s become fashionable to describe her as the ‘Canadian Chekhov,’ but that title barely hints at the scope of her literary influence. Dear Life, her 13th collection, only serves to burnish her reputation for creating intelligent, sophisticated stories out of inarguably humble materials.“ –Minneapolis Star Tribune
„Virtuosic. . . . Encompass a wide variety of always-unpredictable characters–young, old, middle-aged–caught in circumstances that have the bright erratic flow of life itself.“ –The Seattle Times
„Munro is who she is, and we are fortunate to have her. No other author can contain so much life, and so many lives, in such few pages. . . . They can be read over and over, dependably revealing more with each reading.“ –The Miami Herald
„Alice Munro has long been acknowledged as one of Canada’s literary treasures. This new volume, with its historical slant, its autobiographical material, its impressionistic descriptions of scenery, its occasional nostalgia and pleasing irony, confirms her reputation.“ –The Washington Times
„How does Munro manage such great effects on a relatively small canvas? It’s a question that most anyone who has seriously attempted to write a short story in the last 20 years has pondered. . . . Munro has a genius, no empty word here, for selecting details that keep unfolding in the reader’s mind.“ –Los Angeles Times
„Reading Alice Munro is like drinking water–one hardly notices the words, only the marvel at being quenched. . . . Behind each sentence is a world, conjured more distinctly than in many an entire novel.“ –The Plain Dealer
„Alice Munro . . . has earned every bit of her reputation as being one of the best living short story writers, in English if not in the entire world. . . . This collection represents fiction at its finest–captivating, complex, lifelike.“ –Richmond Times-Dispatch
„These stories are perfect. . . . Dear Life is a collection as rich and surprising as any in Alice Munro’s deep career.“ –National Post
„Alice Munro has always been the poet of the unexpected passion that comes seemingly out nowhere and changes a character’s life. . . . She is, and has been for decades, one of our most important writers, one whose work represents all the most essential and pleasurable aspects of literature, and which reminds us of what great literature is: You know it when you see it.“ –The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Praise from fellow writers:
„Her work felt revolutionary when I came to it, and it still does.“ –Jhumpa Lahiri
„She is one of the handful of writers, some living, most dead, whom I have in mind when I say that fiction is my religion.“ –Jonathan Franzen
„The authority she brings to the page is just lovely.“ –Elizabeth Strout
„She’s the most savage writer I’ve ever read, also the most tender, the most honest, the most perceptive.“ –Jeffery Eugenides
„Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.“–Julian Barnes
„She is a short-story writer who…reimagined what a story can do.“ –Loorie Moore
„There’s probably no one alive who’s better at the craft of the short story.“ –Jim Shepard
„A true master of the form.“ –Salman Rushdie
„A wonderful writer.“ –Joyce Carol Oates
– From the Publisher
That Alice Munro…is one of the great short story writers not just of our time but of any time ought to go without saying by now. This new volume…is further proof of her mastery, and also a reminder that unlike a lot of accomplished short story writers…Munro did not hit a characteristic note early on and then stick with it. Over the years her work has deepened and enlarged. At the end of Dear Life is a suite of four stories that Munro says are „autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact,“ and she adds: „I believe they are the first and last-and the closest-things I have to say about my own life.“ They seem to me as good as anything she has ever done, but also to strike out in the direction of a new, late style-one that is not so much a departure as a compressing or summing up of her whole career.
-Charles McGrath
– The New York Times Book Review
Joan Didion once said „I didn’t want to see life reduced to a short story… I wanted to see life expanded to a novel.“ Didion had her own purposes, but Munro readers know that the dichotomy between expansive novel and compressed short story doesn’t hold in her work. Munro (Too Much Happiness) can depict key moments without obscuring the reality of a life filled with countless other moments–told or untold. In her 13th collection, she continues charting the shifts in norms that occur as WWII ends, the horses kept for emergencies go out of use, small towns are less isolated, and then gradually or suddenly, nothing is quite the same. There are no clunkers here, and especially strong stories include „Train,“ „To Reach Japan,“ „Haven,“ and „Corrie.“ And for the first time, Munro writes about her childhood, in the collection’s final four pieces, which she describes as „not quite stories…. I believe they are the first and last–and the closest–things I have to say about my own life.“ These feature the precision of her fiction with the added interest of revealing the development of Munro’s eye and her distance from her surroundings, both key, one suspects, in making her the writer she is. While many of these pieces appeared in the New Yorker, they read differently here; not only has Munro made changes, but more importantly, read together, the stories accrete, deepen, and speak to each other. (Nov.)
– Publishers Weekly
Every new collection from the incomparable Munro, winner of the Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work, is cause for celebration. This new volume offers all the more reason to celebrate as it ends with four stories the author claims are the most autobiographical she has written. As she has moved through the decades, so have her characters, whose stories are mostly set in small-town Ontario in an earlier time or who are looking back from the present with some earned perspective. Two standouts among the riches: in „Train,“ a postwar drifter lands on the doorstep of an older woman who takes him in and allows him to live companionably with her for the next couple of decades. When she is suddenly taken ill, a revelation about her past brings up haunting memories of his own, causing him to abruptly abandon her. In „Dolly,“ the comfortable happiness of an older couple is shaken by the reappearance of a woman with whom the husband had a brief but intense wartime affair. In every story, there is a slow revelation that changes everything we thought we understood about the characters. VERDICT Read this collection and cherish it for dear life.–Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., ON
– Library Journal
A revelation, from the most accomplished and acclaimed of contemporary short story writers. It’s no surprise that every story in the latest collection by Canada’s Munro (Too Much Happiness, 2009, etc.) is rewarding and that the best are stunning. They leave the reader wondering how the writer manages to invoke the deepest, most difficult truths of human existence in the most plainspoken language. But the real bombshell, typically understated and matter-of-fact, comes before the last pieces, which the author has labeled „Finale“ and written in explanation: „The final four works in this book are not quite stories. They form a separate unit, one that is autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact. I believe they are the first and last–and the closest–things I have to say about my own life.“ The „first“ comes as a surprise, because her collection The View from Castle Rock (2006) was so commonly considered atypically autobiographical (albeit drawing more from family legacy than personal memory). And the „last“? When a writer in her early ’80s declares that these are the last things she has to say about her life, they put both the life and the stories in fresh perspective. Almost all of them have an older character remembering her perspective from decades earlier, sometimes amused, more often baffled, at what happened and how things turned out. Most pivot on some sort of romantic involvement, but the partners are unknowable, opaque, often even to themselves. In „Train,“ a character remarks, „Now I have got a real understanding of it and it was nobody’s fault. It was the fault of human sex in a tragic situation.“ In „Leaving Maverley,“ she writes of „the waste of time, the waste of life, by people all scrambling for excitement and paying no attention to anything that mattered.“ The author knows what matters, and the stories pay attention to it.
– Kirkus Reviews
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