![]() ![]() Someone seeking a catalogue of the subtle and quotidian cruelties visited on mid-20th-century Western women will find themselves hotly rewarded here. There were several themes that struck me this time around, ones that hadn’t caught my attention in Munro’s later works. While Munro has clearly perfected her craft over time, her earlier works prove that her starting point was far beyond where most writers could hope to arrive at the end of a long and successful career. Given that I read Family Furnishings––a collection of stories from 1995-2014––prior to this volume, I personally have experienced the evolution of Munro’s career in reverse order. It contains stories of varying quality, ranging from merely excellent to shockingly brilliant. Selected Stories: 1968-94 is a deep dive into Munro’s early writings. Her fictional examinations of the human condition are simultaneously plainspoken and impenetrable each seems infused with a secret that only Munro can clearly see, but that the reader may glimpse fleetingly in a moment of hard concentration or blind luck. ![]() This woman appears to produce beautiful phrases with the readiness and ease with which average humans produce carbon dioxide. Having now read more than 1,000 pages of Alice’s Munro’s prose, it is clear to me that she is a once-in-a-generation kind of talent. ![]()
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