New Selected Stories

by Alice Munro

Winner of the nobel prize in literaturespanning her last five collections and bringing together her finest work from the past fifteen years, this new selection of alice munros stories infuses everyday lives with a wealth of nuance and insight written with emotion and empathy, beautifully observed and remarkably crafted, these stories are nothing short of perfection a masterclass in the genre, from an author who deservedly lays claim to being one of the major fiction writers of our time

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Literature, Canada, Classics

434 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Collections of short stories of noted Canadian writer Alice Munro of life in rural Ontario include Dance of the Happy Shades (1968) and Moons of Jupiter (1982); for these and vivid novels, she won the Nobel Prize of 2013 for literature.

People widely consider her premier fiction of the world. Munro thrice received governor general's award. She focuses on human relationships through the lens of daily life. People thus refer to this "the Canadian Chekhov."

(Arabic: أليس مونرو)
(Persian: آلیس مانرو)
(Russian Cyrillic: Элис Манро)
(Ukrainian Cyrillic: Еліс Манро)
(Bulgarian Cyrillic: Алис Мънро)
(Slovak: Alice Munroová)
(Serbian: Alis Manro)

Reviews

[Nita Kohli · Rating 5 out of 5]

My second book from Alice Munro this year. I don't seem to get enough of Munro's writing (same for Margaret Atwood). Whenever I read Munro's stories, I cannot help but think that I should have read her books earlier. But, then I realise that perhaps it is good that I discovered this author now as my younger self would not have appreciated or even understood her narration. And I would have failed to understand how beautifully she writes but at the same time she hits you with reality in a subtle way. That is how her writing is - powerful and close to life.
Whenever I am reading any of her stories, there are moments when I close the book and reflect upon my life or the lives of people I know or have known. Or in case if I don't have any one to associate, I would just stop and contemplate what I am reading just for a while.
This collection of stories is once again a masterpiece from Munro. Though I loved all the stories in this book, my favourite would be "My Mother's Dream", "The Bear Came Over the Mountain", all the stories in Runaway - "Chance", "Soon" and "Silence".
Munro's stories are not of the kind to be read and done away with. These need to be revisited and savoured - something I plan to do.

[notgettingenough · Rating 3 out of 5]

I shouldn't have been seduced into buying this, much prefer her long collections and have read almost all of them. Maybe the selection partly doesn't work because Munro takes care with each of her collections so that the contents always fit together in a satisfying way.

[Alicia Fenney · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alright, so I haven't read the whole book but unfortunately after a handful of stories I mostly had to force myself to start (the reading and finishing was no problem for most - she's a great writer), I need to mark this as read and move on; I miss my novels!

I had a bit of a bad start with "The Love of a Good Woman" and quit after about 10 of 55 pages. Not great for my morale, that it was the first story. So I managed expectations and researched which stories were well received. The list is long, of course (and "The Love" was on there twice... Not a good omen), but I decided to jump forward a decade and read the stories from her later works.

I enjoyed "Lying Under the Apple Tree," then "Chance," "Soon," and "Silence" from the collection Runaway.

I hope to read, someday: Hateship, Family Furnishings, The Bear, The View, Dimensions, and Free Radicals, all stories that were highly rated. But for now, I'm grateful to have finally read Alice Munro and to have learned that I need a good novel to sustain my reading interest.

[Nidhi · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book is life in miniature, vividly rendered and finely detailed.

[Andrew Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alice Munro presents us with so many different characters of the ordinary people, and their everyday struggles. This helps us to recognise many different shades of people we meet in our own lives. The following description of the individual stories is just for my memory, as with all the great writers, a plot is usually of the secondary importance to the exceptional style used to present it. In this case, each story is presented in a series of the individual developments, which only when looked in its entirety reveals true complexity and meaning behind the individual segments.
Individual stories:
The Love of a Good Woman - an interesting story about what is true and what we may think as a truth but may turn out our imagination. The action takes place around Walley at Lake Ontario. Three young boys discover a drown body of a local optometrist, Mr. Willens, while swimming in Peregrine river. Enid – a nurse, is looking after Mrs. Quinn, who is dying of kidney failure. Rupert Quinn, a farmer, graduated from high school in the same class with Enid. Enid lives with her widowed mother, next door to Willens’s and she remember playing bridge with them, and Mr. Willens being very nice to her.
A day before her death, Mrs. Quinn tells Enid that Mr. Willens has visited her to check her eyesight, and while doing this he touched her inappropriately. This was observed by her husband, who returned home, and consequently bit him up and then arranged an accident with Mr. Willens ending up in the river. Enid doesn’t know what to do with that. She wants initially to question Rupert after the funeral, but then assumes that all this was a lie, and instead she decides to live with him and his daughters.
The Children Stay – A young couple (Pauline and Brian) spend their summer holiday on the east coast of Vancouver Island, with their two young daughters (Mara – 16 months old, and Caitlin) and the husband’s parents. Brian works as a teacher and is good at it. At a barbecue organised by Brian’s school, Pauline is asked by Jeffrey Toom to play Eurydice at the local amateur theatre group. Pauline accepts and attends their weekly rehearsals. During the holiday, she tries to memorise her role. During all this marital bliss, it turns out that Pauline becomes Jeffrey’s lover. She runs away and starts a new life with Jeffrey. After many years, she is reunited with her daughter, who don’t hate her but don’t forgive her either.
My Mother’s Dream – At the end of the second world war, a young, pregnant wife (Jill) learns that her airman husband (George Kirkham) has been killed in the final weeks of the war. Being an orphan, she moves in with his family, his two older sisters – Ailsa and Iona, and their widowed mother. Ailsa did not go to college, as she had to support George with his law studies. She works in the local post office. Iona works night shifts in a bakery. She has poor nervous constitution and has already been treated with shocks at the local psychiatric hospital. They are both unmarried and without any prospects. The whole story is being told by the Jill’s daughter. As the baby, she was crying a lot and the only person who could pacify her was Iona, who released her maternal instinct, resigned from her job and took total care of the baby. After a couple of months their mother needs to visit her friends and they decide that because the baby is too young, Jill will stay with her. Jill finds it very difficult to cope, attempts to play her violin to no avail, and finally exhausted decides to take some sleeping pills and gives a small portion to her baby. After another day and half, the sisters and their mother return and find Jill asleep. Iona finds the baby and announced that she is dead and starts having her nervous fits. She hides the baby and everyone is petrified of the situation. After some time, baby starts crying and Jill is the only one to hear it. She finds her hidden underneath the couch. Everything returns to normal and Jill moves out to work as a musician. She marries another man and has two more daughters with him. The narrator finds that those critical few days made Jill to take up her motherhood and for her to accept her as her mother.
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage – Johanna works as housekeeper for Mr McCauley, who lives with her granddaughter Sabitha. Together with her friend Edith, Sabitha hutch up a plot to insert messages from her father, together with his letters to Sabitha. Johanna, unsuspectedly believes the message and responds back. The girls replace her message with their own and create an impression in Johanna’s mind that the father wants to marry her. She ships furniture that was originally bought by Mr. McCauley for her daughter as a wedding present, to Mr. Boudreau – widower and father of Sabitha, and leaves a letter of resignation. She travels to Gdynia, Saskatchewan, where Mr. Boudreau has recently won a dilapidated hotel. Having found him very sick she cares for him, and wins his confidence to finally marry him and have a son with him.
Family Furnishings – A young woman recollects her parents and her aunt, who was unlike anyone else in the family. She was a local paper writer and pretty unconventional. The rest of the family were mostly farming people and very conservative. While a student she visited her aunt, and found her home full of old furniture given to her by parents and relatives.
The Bear Came Over the Mountain – Grant, a retired professor of Nordic Literature lives with his wife Fiona, who starts displaying signs of dementia. They decide to put her in the local facility called Meadowlake. After a compulsory initial one month break, Grant visits Fiona and finds her mental facilities continuing to deteriorate. He visits her twice a week and after some time he finds that Fiona spends a lot of time with Aubrey, an elderly patient in wheelchair. She helps him with bridge cards play and generally seems to be attracted to him. Aubrey is one day taken away from the facility by his wife, as his stay was only temporary. Fiona’s condition deteriorates as a consequence, and she spends most of her time in bed. Grant approaches Aubrey’s wife but she is not interested in allowing her husband to visit Fiona. However, later in the day she leaves a message on Grant’s phone, inviting him to dances, she was involved with an organising committee. In the last scene Grant brings Aubrey to Meadowlake, but Fiona seems not to remember Aubrey, but then embraces either him or Grant – it appears this has been done unclear on purpose.
Chance – Juliet, a young classics expert, returns from her temporary teaching job. On a train to Vancouver, she is approached by a middle-aged man who proposes to chum around together. She ignores him and leaves her seat to move to the observation deck. The train stops for a few minutes at a small station and then having started stops again. It turns out that the man who approached Juliet has committed suicide. She blames herself for being so mean to him. Later she decides to visit her previous lover- Eric, a middle-aged man, with paralysed wife. Having arrived, she learns that the wife has passed away. She visits his house, and only finds his neighbour’s wife who cleans the place. The woman tells her that Eric was absent and stayed with his current girlfriend - Christa. Nevertheless, she decides to stay overnight and is visited by Eric in the morning. She stays on as Eric’s girlfriend and Christa becomes her great friend and mainstay during the years ahead.
Soon – Juliet, a Latin scholar, visits her parents with her one year old daughter, Penelope. Her mother is bed-bound most of the time. Juliet finds a housekeeper, Irene, doing all the house work. There is a tension between Irene and Juliet, about Irene’s role. Also, her parents are not very happy with Juliet being unmarried. During one of the regular visits to her mother, by the local pastor, Juliet gets involved in an angry discussion about the religion and the fact that her parents never were religious before.
Silence – It’s a continuation of Juliet’s story after 18 years’ hiatus. Juliet has become a television personality, her partner got killed during one of the sea storms and Penelope joined a religious group. She completely broke contact with Juliet. Only after some years Juliet found out that Penelope left the group and set up her own family and had five children. She never tried to contact Juliet, who got reconciled to it and at peace knowing that Penelope was alive.
The View from Castle Rock – A story of family migrating from Scotland to Canada in 1818. Andrew, his younger brother Walter, their sister Mary, their father Old James, Andrew’s wife Agnes and their son Young James embark on a ship in Leith to cross the Atlantic. During the trip Agnes delivers her daughter Penelope, Walter meets a daughter of rich wine merchant and is offered a position in the company. He refuses as he intends to be a discoverer. The title comes from Andrew’s remembering stay in Edenborough and climbing the castle rock with his drunken father and his companions, and being told that they could see America from there. As with the other stories, the beauty is not in the events but the whole story is presented.
Lying Under the Apple Tree – A story of a young girl and her friendship with a young boy from Salvation Army family.
Hired Girl – A young girl is working during summer holiday as a maid at island property of rich financier. She is spotted reading a book left laying by the owner of the property who visits it on weekends. Before she leaves home he gifts her the book.
Dimensions – A powerful story of young woman, with three children and controlling husband. Following one of the quarrels she leaves the house to stay with her friend, he kills the children. Having been declared criminally insane and locked in the institution. The poor woman struggles with her loss, but visits her husband. He writes her a letter that he saw their children in a different dimension and that they were fine and happy. When she decides to visit him again, travelling on a bus she comes across an accident and a young man laying unconscious in the snow. She attends him with the bus driver and applies first aid which results in the young man recovering his breath. While the bus driver wants to resume their trip, she discovers she doesn’t need to get back on the bus and decides not to visit her husband anymore.
Deep-Holes – Sally, her husband Alex, and their three children set off on a picnic to celebrate Alex’s article on geology having been printed in a professional journal. They set of for the area known by its deep holes but with beautiful vistas at the end. Once they reach it their two sons Kent and Peter disappear in a bush and Peter comes back saying that Kent has fallen into one of the holes. They manage to get him out and get to hospital where they find his two legs were broken. A few years later Kent abandons his studies and becomes a drifter. After some years, the sister if his identifies him on a local news and finds out where he leaves and visits him. The following week Sally visits him at his commune. He is preoccupied in helping other people like himself and asks her for some money. On her return, Sally considers sending him a cheque.
Free Radicals – Nita stays at home, having unexpectedly lost her husband, whilst herself suffering from terminal cancer with prospect of dying within next twelve months. When trying to open the front door to get some fresh air she comes across a man asking to see her electricity meter. Once she lets him in he complains of diabetes and asks for something to eat. He also gets more threatening but she is not much afraid considering her health status. He shows her a picture of his parents and disabled sister and complains that he had very hard life as his sister was occupying their parents’ minds and he had to leave home early. However, he was promised the house. When some years later his parents contacted him again they wanted for him to take a care of his sister as the condition of getting the house. He visits them and shots them dead. The second picture he shows Nita is of them being dead. He asks about the car in the front yard and wants to take it with him. Nita offers him some wine and having drunk most of it he leaves in the car. Nita has to rest and being awaken by a policeman who tells her about her car having been involved in the accident and the driver killed in result. They also know that he was sought for triple murder.

[L. D. Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Without fail, every short story I have ever read by Alice Munro is a little world fully fleshed and felt. No word wasted, endings often left deftly to the reader's imagination, characters offered up gently like sacred sacrifices, beloved, sometimes utterly doomed, and often saved by their own audacity. I come away each time with my vision wiped clear, astonished by life's freshness and brutal beauty. Munro is a master!

[Sophia Siddiqui · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every time I read one of these stories I just had to sit, look at a blank wall, and let it soak in for a couple of minutes. I read this collection very slowly over five months savouring every story.

My fave collection was runaway - I loved how it followed the same person over different stages of life. The way Monro captures the passing of time is so clever. I’m glad I read this when I did, it’s been sitting on my shelf unread for 6 years!

[Joan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A selection of stories taken from various other of Alice Munro's books, some of which therefore I had read before. However that wasn't a problem as her stories are definitely re-readable. It took me a long time to read this book, because I was reading novels at the same time and kept leaving this to one side. I like how her stories are almost like novellas in their depth and scope and yet never driven by an exciting plot, so much as life unfolding in different ways.

[Paul Taylor · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this heavy going. There are some good stories but some of them rather dagged. I found it difficult at times to conjure up a sense of place which meant that some of the stories felt remote and impenetrable. I certainly don't feel inspired to read any more of Alice Munro's work.

[Marcel Plessis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Artless stories about heartless people. I don't know, I don't get it. Maybe it is just this collection, but "and-then-and-then stories" about cruel people not doing very much at all is not for me. There is no music here.

[Michele Day · Rating 4 out of 5]

always a pleasure to read short stories old and new by Alice Munro

[Brian · Rating 2 out of 5]

A surprisingly dull collection.

[E.A. Hardy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very fine. She's a good writer.

[Shreejit Sarkar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alice Munro wrote the stories of our life with vivid detailing and sensuous touch.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I nearly gave this 5, but I think the later stories weren't as strong for me. The first half was exceptional, and the second half was just very good. Really I'm just being picky! I would still recommend reading this collection to anyone who enjoys short stories, though.

[Mike · Rating 2 out of 5]

I got more than half way through this book but really lost interest and gave up. The stories are quite long. It gets two stars because the stories I read were ok but I have already completely forgotten what they were about.

[Kylie Moppert · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's an idea taught to new writers, that your protagonist has to be put through hell. The idea being readers like to read about other people's horror. Reading several of these stories I had the distinct impression Alice Munro was putting us, the reader, through hell. Some of her characters are put through such incredible pain and misfortune.
What a writer!

[Philip Zyg · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great collection of Ms Munro's latest works (currently reading the first volume, actually). Deeper and more compelling than previous fiction, Munro manages to overcome obvious stereotypes of minimalism (lone women telling their private feelings about how hard life is and how dumb most men are) and shapes her own literary tone, taking unexpected but welcome liberties with time and space.
My favourite in this collection is "Too much happiness", that closes the book.

[Timothy · Rating 5 out of 5]

from The Love of a Good Woman (1998):

The Love of a Good Woman
The Children Stay
My Mother's Dream

from Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001):

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
Family Furnishings
The Bear Came Over the Mountain

from Runaway (2004):

Chance
Soon
Silence

from The View from Castle Rock (2006):

The View from Castle Rock
Lying Under the Apple Tree
Hired Girl

from Too Much Happiness (2009):

Dimensions
Deep-Holes
Free Radicals

[Danielle Burns · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderfully vivid real life stories, each one with its own delicious twist and all seemingly related. My copy is filled with post it notes marking the many descriptive passages that hit home ... will be going up on my short story faves shelf along with Tim Winton & Cate Kennedy.

[Anna Wallman · Rating 5 out of 5]

some stories were better Than others, but all of them caught me. only downside being that it took a long time to finish, it has enough material for two volumes and I was a bit stressed out having To return it To the library. Buy it!

[Enid · Rating 5 out of 5]

She writes excellent short stories. Only part way through but it is ace.
These are excellently observed , well written and always with an unexpected twist at the end.Not always pleasant subjects, but the best short story writer i have read in a while.

[Ferda Ak · Rating 3 out of 5]

not as impressing as some of the other short stories by other authors, such as Capote. Salinger,Steinbeck etc.