Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories (Vintage International)

4.3 | 1,184 ratings

Price: 1.99

Last update: 07-10-2024

About this item

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro come nine short stories with “the intimacy of a family photo album and the organic feel of real life” (The New York Times)

“In Munro’s hands, as in Chekhov’s, a short story is more than big enough to hold the world—and to astonish us, again and again.”—Chicago Tribune

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD • A TIME BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

In the nine breathtaking stories that make up this collection, Alice Munro creates narratives that loop and swerve like memory, conjuring up characters as thorny and contradictory as people we know ourselves.

The fate of a strong-minded housekeeper with a “frizz of reddish hair,” just entering the dangerous country of old-maidhood, is unintentionally (and deliciously) reversed by a teenaged girl’s practical joke. A college student visiting her aunt for the first time and recognizing the family furniture stumbles on a long-hidden secret and its meaning in her own life. An inveterate philanderer finds the tables turned when he puts his wife into an old-age home. A young cancer patient stunned by good news discovers a perfect bridge to her suddenly regained future. A woman recollecting an afternoon’s wild lovemaking with a stranger realizes how the memory of that encounter has both changed for her and sustained her through a lifetime.

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is Munro at her best—tirelessly observant, serenely free of illusion, deeply and gloriously humane.

Susan

Short stories at their best....

Reviewed in the United States on March 20, 2014

I'm not normally a big fan of short stories, since many become simple ramblings and can come off as without much plot or character development. However, Alice Munro is a master short story teller and she certainly deserves all the literary prizes that she's been awarded during her writing career, including the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature. Her stories are tightly and masterfully constructed to entertain and challenge the places in our hearts that we often try to keep to ourselves.

Using extremely skillful and varied literary techniques, Alice Munro shares with us the realities of ordinary lives and what it means to be human. Even though her settings are mostly centered on small town Canada, and over several decades, her characters are widely varied and depict the lives that surround the readers' own lives. Anyone can easily relate to Alice Munro's tales and enjoy her gift for storytellling, at its highest level.

Typically, Ms. Munro's stories depict Everywoman and Everyman, especially the former. Many of Alice Munro's story lines taunt the reader to go down into potentially maudlin and darker places of the human heart, as the reader begins to empathize with the characters' life crises, successes and challenges. Many characters' travails and/or triumphs can sometimes bring the reader to tears, near to laughter and often relief. The stories' small town settings are fraught with the usual array of background characters and everyday life events. As the story lines march along, the conflicts among characters, or within the characters themselves, reshape their hopes and dreams. Typically, Ms. Munro suddenly and dramatically alters her characters' lives, when life decisions and situations threaten to crush the characters' spirits and rip apart their potentially happy and secure futures.

However, as her stories prepare to conclude, Ms. Munro skillfully brings her main characters' courage into play, so that their altered lives can redeem their pasts, as they reach out to others, thus changing themselves and setting the tempo for a more mature, informed and hopeful future. One could not go wrong with a few hours spent within the life and times of Alice Munro's Everyman and Everywoman. She's a true master of the short story.

For those who enjoy Alice Munro's stories, the novelists Barbara Kingsolver and Anne Tyler are also excellent authors whose characters' also meander along everyday paths. Their main characters' existence also amble along into the same fulfillment and redemption of ordinary lives that Ms. Munro wishes to depict.
.

Scrambler

Evidence Ms. Munro deserves the honor she received in Sweden this year

Reviewed in the United States on December 2, 2013

Although short stories are not my usual preferred format and after two other of her books to which I did not warm, I found this collection by our 2013 Nobel winner in literature to be excellent. I highly recommend this collection to any reader willing to forgo romanticism for clear headed, non-judgmental stories on being alive in middle class Midwestern Canada today. The leaning is towards a woman's perspective, but the stories should be equally readable for either men or women. Each touches something that any 21st century Western civilization adult has either experienced or has known someone who has. None are simple and all are largely non-sentimental, but still with considerable empathy.

David Erasmus McDonald

A Delightful and Compulsive Read

Reviewed in the United States on May 20, 2024

Actually, a re-read, in tribute of one of my favorite authors. Ms. Munro keeps the art of short fiction alive and well … and kicking!

Robert Tonkavich

Enjoyable Reading in a Different Style

Reviewed in the United States on November 19, 2013

Ms. Munro writes in a slightly different style, although very enjoyable. This is a collection of her short story works and I have been very pleasantly enjoying the detail and descriptive writing. Some of the stories "End" unexpectedly, kind of like life in itself, but you are then on to the next story. The collection spans a period in time so it is almost like reading a bit of history, especially when one compares the fast energetic pace that we fill ourselves with today. I am sure anyone would enjoy her collection.

Constant Weeder

The Best of the Best

Reviewed in the United States on March 20, 2005

This excellent collection came out in 2001 but is timeless in its scope. The characters have strange encounters which deepen them: a courtship between a middle-aged, geographically separated couple begins because of letters intercepted, steamed open, and replied to by teenagers; in "Floating Bridge" a woman cancer patient has an encounter with an adolescent boy who understands her better than anyone else; in "Comfort," a long marriage ends with Lou Gherig's Disease, cremation, and the realization of love. In another story unusable love is described after an occurrence on a golf course between playmates grown to adulthood; in "What is Remembered," a bush doctor flies down to a funeral and has a sexual encounter with the widow; the narrator in "Post and Beam" makes a bargain with herself to go on living after encountering her miserable, suicidal cousin; "Queenie" involves a woman left behind by a coldhearted man; the final story makes a match between the spouses of two Alzheimer's patients.

Munro is a born phrase-maker. "Her teeth were crowded to the front of her mouth as if they were ready for an argument." "High heels, thin ankles, girdle so tight her nylons rasped." A smart aleck holds up the wall of a drugstore. "The house was full of callous desertion, of deceit." "...the well-mannered gentleman, his mind on other times..." In a shoe repair shop, "the emery stone on a tool's edge sang high like a mechanical insect and the sewing machine punched the leather in an earnest industrial rhythm. These are not examples of fine writing, they're observations from real life. And how wonderful are her endings! "Floating Bridge" concludes with the cancer patient thinking "What she felt was a lighthearted sort of compassion, almost like laughter. A swish of tender hilarity, getting the better of all her sores and hollows, for the time given."

Most of the stories are set in the past, from the 40s through the 60s. One story mentions John L. Lewis, the famous self-taught Welshman who headed the United Mine Workers for years and developed a penchant for flowery speech. Attacking President Truman, he began "It ill behooves one who has supped at Labor's table...." Munro would enjoy that.

As the poet of the emotions, Munro has no equal. "The cries of the crowd came to me like big heartbeats, full of sorrows. Lovely formal-sounding waves, with their distant, almost inhuman assent and lamentation. This is what I wanted, this was what I thought I had to pay attention to, this was how I wanted my life to be." And after the scattering of the ashes in "Comfort" the last line is, "A sickening shock at first, then amazement that you were still moving, lifted up on a stream of steely devotion--calm above the surface of your life, surviving, though the pain of the cold continued to wash into your body."

They don't make stories any better than that.

John

Brilliant

Reviewed in the United States on June 16, 2024

A UWO/Canadian Treasure.

Lea

Good stories

Reviewed in the United States on June 25, 2024

I liked the topics she wrote about.

sissy

This book arrived quickly and in the condition described!

Reviewed in the United States on May 25, 2024

This book arrived quickly and in the condition described!

Best Sellers in

Happy Place

4.2 90942

4.99

Romancing Mister Bridgerton: Penelope & Colin's Story, The Inspiration for Bridgerton Season Three (Bridgertons Book 4)

4.6 38113

7.99

It Ends with Us: A Novel

4.7 383449

11.99

On Her Watch (Bree Taggert Book 8)

4.7 11583

6.99

Divine Rivals: A Novel (Letters of Enchantment Book 1)

4.4 60103

1.99

Legacy: A Novel

4.6 26353

1.99

Fragile Sanctuary (Sparrow Falls Book 1)

4.6 14632