If I was trying to convince readers to try Alice Munro, choosing this sampling of three stories might not be the best way to approach the matter. Each is stuffed with sadness, with resignation and despair to season the blend. But it’s as though there is also a dash of
Mavis Gallant’s Home Truths Gage-Macmillan, 1981. I discovered Mavis Gallant’s stories when I was nearly twenty. I was working in a bookstore and there was a fresh display of New Canadian Library mass-market pocketbooks. (It was the same display that got me reading Alice Munro, but that, too, took some
Lynn Coady’s Play the Monster Blind Doubleday-Random House, 2000 Worthlessness. Disappointment. Boredom. Hellishness. Despair. The eleven stories in Lynn Coady’s debut collection (which followed her astonishingly successful debut novel Strange Heaven) are not for the faint-of-heart. Worthlessness, from “A Great Man’s Passing” “It was her fault because she had done
Thanks for the Ride I’m accustomed to thinking of Alice Munro as the chronicler of Lives of Girls and Women, so I was surprised to come upon a male narrator in “Thanks for the Ride”. Dickie is hanging out with his cousin, George, who is three years older, in Pop’s
Back at the beginning of December, the idea of reading Alice Munro’s stories from the beginning, through her most recent collection, Too Much Happiness, just seemed like a good idea. But now that I’ve actually begun. Now that it’s moved from the sphere of the possible to the sphere of
