Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (Thorndike Press Large Print Women's Fiction Series) - Hardcover

Munro, Alice

4.04

19,863 ratings by Goodreads

9780786242313: Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (Thorndike Press Large Print Women's Fiction Series)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786242310 ISBN 13: 9780786242313

Publisher: Thorndike Pr, 2002

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A collection of short fiction explores the complexities of human relationships and emotions in stories about a housekeeper entering old-maidhood whose life is transformed by a practical joke and a lifelong philanderer who finds the tables turned.

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Review:

The award-winning Canadian writer Alice Munro's collection Hateship, friendship, courtship, loveship, marriage is about the lives, hopes, dreams and ends of women: their marriages, their relationships with those who touch their lives in some momentous way--however brief or long-standing--and the extraordinary effects wrought by the hand of fate. She is not only a genius storyteller, she has a cunning ability to make you believe the short story you've just read was actually a full-length novel. So if you've ever thought twice about buying a book of short stories, then the marvellous Alice Munro will make you think again..

Munro's world is one of post-war Canada, when women are beginning to experience a constrained kind of freedom. In "What is Remembered", a chance meeting at a funeral has a profound, yet stabilising effect on Meriel, a young wife and mother. "Young husbands", writes Munro, "were stern in those days". Between learning how to kowtow to bosses and manage wives, there was so much else to learn: mortgages, lawns and politics for a start. The wives, meantime, were afforded the opportunity of "a second kind of adolescence"--but only in the confines of the family home, while the men were absent, and only after wifely jobs were accounted for. In the book's title story, a capable, spinsterly housekeeper finds love in the most unexpected place, in the most unexpected way. However the opportunity presents itself, it is what you choose to make of it that really matters, the author seems to be saying. Johanna could be deeply disappointed with her "opportunity" but, in her straightforward way, amends a few details and makes the most of it.

Alice Munro's stories are retrospective; tales of lives lived, for better or worse. If you want something, take it, quickly. You only get one life, and this is it. --Carey Green

Review:

"Another breathtaking demonstration of her mastery of the short story... No one could possibly dispute Munro's greatness; the genius of her seamless, unmatchable prose which nets up the flow of everyday life so miraculously" (Daily Mail)

"Munro gives each of her stories the rich density of a compacted novel...The distinctive vitality of her stories come from their imaginative limberness...triumphantly displays impressive feats of flexibility, always gracefully adapted to life's twists and turns" (Sunday Times)

"Munro is an artist of the domestic interior... She stands at an angle to the mass of her contemporaries set aside both by the beauty of her prose and by the calm intensity of her engagement with her material" (Evening Standard)

"The nine stories in this collection have the kind of spaciousness, the attention to detail, that one expects from lengthier fiction... There is a core of mystery in every Munro story, and that is why re-reading them is such a continuous pleasure" (Independent)

"Each of her tales contains the depth and scope of a novel...these melancholy, autumnal tales of small-town Canadian life demonstrate the gentle power of the short story at its best" (New Statesman)

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