Product Description

U.S.A. $24.00

In Alice Munro's superb new collection, we find stories about women of all ages and circumstances, their lives made palpable by the subtlety and empathy of this incomparable writer.
The runaway of the title story is a young woman who, though she thinks she wants to, is incapable of leaving her husband. In "Passion," a country girl emerging into the larger world via a job in a resort hotel discovers in a single moment of stunning insight the limits and lies of that mysterious emotion. Three stories are about a woman named Juliet-in the first, she escapes from teaching at a girls' school into a wild and irresistible love match; in the second she returns with her child to the home of her parents, whose life and marriage she finally begins to examine; and in the last, her child, caught, she mistakenly thinks, in the grip of a religious cult, vanishes into an unexplained and profound silence. In the final story, "Powers," a young woman with the ability to read the future sets off a chain of events that involves a friend and her husband-to-be in lifelong pursuit of what such a gift really means, and who really has it.
Throughout this compelling collection, Alice Munro's understanding of the people about whom she writes makes them as vivid as our own neighbors. Here are the infinite betrayals and surprises of love-between men and women, between friends, between parents and children-that are the stuff of all our lives. It is Alice Munro's special gift to make these stories as vivid and real as our own.

Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published ten previous collections of stories-Dance of the Happy Shades; Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You; The Beggar Maid; The Moons of Jupiter; The Progress of Love; Friend of My Youth; Open Secrets; her Selected Stories; The Love of a Good Woman; and Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage --as well as a novel, Lives of Girls and Women. During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including three of Canada's Governor General's Literary Awards and its Giller Prize; the Rea Award for Short Fiction; the Lannan Literary Award; England's W. H. Smith Award; and the United States' National Book Critics Circle Award. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages.
Alice Munro and her husband divide their time between Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron, and Comox, British Columbia.

Alice Munro's Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage; The Love of a Good Woman; Selected Stories; Open Secrets; The Progress of Love; and Lives of Girls and Women are available in Vintage paperback.

Author photograph by Derek Shapton
Jacket art: TK
Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson

Alfred A.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #60120 in Books
• Published on: 2004-10-26
• Released on: 2004-10-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

Amazon.com Review
Alice Munro has been accused of telling the same story over and over, and to a certain extent the characterization is true. Her subject matter is inevitably the vagaries of love between middle-aged people in some rural Canadian setting, trapped there by the combination of their desires and weaknesses. Or, if not love, then at least the mysteries of relationships as characters struggle to understand each other and themselves. But this thematic single-mindedness can hardly be considered a criticism considering Munro tells stories better than anybody else and with a level of precision matched by few. It would be like criticizing Shakespeare for writing about politics.

Runaway is no exception. The stories take place throughout Canada--northern Ontario, the Prairies, the West Coast, Stratford--and feature women and men drifting in and out of each other's orbits, pulled by forces they don't understand. In "Runaway," a woman considers leaving her husband with the help of a neighbor, but the husband has other plans. In "Chance," a woman leaves her life behind in a quest for a man she met on a train crossing the country. Their intertwined lives play out through two more stories, "Soon" and "Silence," but the path they follow is as unpredictable to the reader as it is to them. In "Trespasses," a small town's women dream of escaping their lives only to find themselves in lives they never imagined.

What really marks the stories is Munro's sense of mood. There's a sense of hidden menace or even violence everywhere in Runaway. It occasionally erupts, but always in surprising and unexpected ways, and with unintended consequences. Munro may be an old-fashioned storyteller, but she understands chaos theory well enough. The same story? Sure. But it's a damn good one. --Peter Darbyshire, Amazon.ca

From Bookmarks Magazine
Often compared to Eudora Welty, Anton Chekhov, and James Joyce, Munro is a brilliant short story-writer. She mines the small towns of her native Ontario for inspiration, penning short stories (30-40 pages each) that possess the depth of novels. Runaway, her tenth collection, contains her trademark unconventional plots and lost characters. Critics agree that the suspense and drama lodged within the characters give each story its power. Like the best writers, Munro involves readers in her characters’ thoughts and actions, "coaxing trust out of our hands before we realize we had it to give away" (The Oregonian). The tiniest details relate to the largest themes—and most, involving women—are not happy. As the Seattle Times notes, Munro introduces "tougher and chillier than usual" moments than in previous collections, like 1994’s Open Secrets. But, even with a darker view of human nature, Munro "sings, and her women are heroic" (Boston Globe).

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* The CIP subject heading assigned to this collection of stories is "Women--Fiction." Accurate, yes, and helpful to librarians, of course, but at the same time so reductive, for although Canadian Munro does indeed write about women, her sheer perception and eloquence make her one of the foremost contemporary practitioners of the short story in English. And her status only gains more secure footing with the appearance of these eight new pieces. Munro's stories range "long"--that is, in the 30- to 40-page category. Their planned cohesion and intended restriction of focus actually mean that Munro has invented her own "genre" of short fiction: not undeveloped novels or even unfledged novellas but, rather, true short stories offering a widening and deepening of exploration that shorter pages don't allow. The title story ranks among Munro's best: a showcase of her own approach to "Women--Fiction." A young woman is encouraged by a neighbor to leave her husband, whom she believes is causing her mental distress, but upon discovering that running away really means just being lost, she returns home. And a cycle of three stories featuring the same character at three important junctures in her life is faultless in its clear-cut delineation of the arc of love, loss, and disconnection the woman's family relations have come to represent. Munro is remarkable for the ease and completeness with which she brings the world of a character into the frame, and her characteristic and greatly effective looping through time--not just connecting present and past but also indicating the future--is haunting. All this in a lovely, precise style. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Beautiful Stories
If you have not read Alice Munro, how I envy you. You have so much pleasure ahead of you. She writes for all of us about wonder- the wonder of everyday life; the small things; the touching things; the things that make you say, yes, this is the human heart; all of these are her fictional world, much as they are our pasts, and our presents. This is a strong collection and an excellent place to get to know what she is about. After this, explore her backlist. My personal favorite besides this is an early collection called,The Moons of Jupiter, which is still in print in a nice paperbak format. I hope you enjoy discovering her as much as I have.

Through the prism of time. . .
Alice Munro's newest collection of short stories is about time, how small events change lives, and how different those events look as time passes. Several of the stories span the lifetimes of the characters, focusing on one event that changes things forever.
Take "Chance," "Soon" and "Silence," a trio of stories about Juliet, a young woman whose choices about who to speak to on a train change her life forever. Munro masterfully picks three incidents, the train ride, a visit home, and a search for a daughter, and through them tells the story of Juliet's life. I found it sad to see how the great passion of the first story ends in an accident by the third. Or "Tricks," perhaps the most painful story in the collection. The story opens with Robin saying the most banal thing one could imagine, "I'll die if that dress isn't ready." Then we learn why, and when Munro repeats the line again we see it's fraught with meaning. We learn of a chance meeting that offers a promise that's snatched away a year later; only at the end of her life does Robin learn what really happened.
Suicides, lost souls and disappointments thread through these stories. Munro's world is a lost and lonely place, and be forewarned--none of these stories promises a happy ending. But they're beautifully written and struck a chord--don't we all recall brief, seemingly trivial moments years later and wonder what if?

Wonderful writing, bland stories.
I understand that I am in the minority on this one. Please understand that I have nothing but respect for Ms. Munro's gifts, I just felt that this collection of stories was listless and bland. There was nothing relevatory, nothing gripping, nothing that moved me. There was no introspection after reading these stories, there was only passing recognition of some of the characters.

It felt shallow to me. Perhaps that was the point with some characters, but the entire time I felt as if each character was talking slightly tilted away from the person they were addressing, as if they were reciting things that they _should_ say, not anything that actually reverberated as the truth.

To be clear, I'm not looking for high drama. I can see the drama in life's little complexities as well as the next devotee of the New Yorker, but these stories come off as someone relaying the mildly interesting stories of some mildly interesting people. And that, for me, is not enough. But as you can see, your mileage may vary. And I may very well be an idiot.