Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The station agent often tried a little teasing with women, especially the plain ones who seemed to appreciate it.

Hateship Friendship Courtship Loveship Marriage by Alice Munro

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I feel like every review of Alice Munro books, except for maybe her most recent book Dear Life, would be exactly the same. Dear Life is different because that book contains long sections of memoir stories that change the tenor of the over all collection. So if you like Alice Munro, you’ll like this one. She’s one of the most consistent writers I’ve ever read. I read her collected stories, which is about 650 pages of 35 years worth of her best stories, and then […]

You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.

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I started the year off with a review of Mavis Gallant’s stories, and now for the next Canadian literary siren, Alice Munro. Famous of course for winning the Nobel Prize and for a few of her stories/linked stories becoming films, Alice Munro is known for writing exclusively short stories, though she herself admits in the introduction to this collection that she had wanted to write novels but they never came and that as she got older her stories became long and longer. The longest story […]

The Nobel Committee Made a Good Choice

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All you Cannonballers know that Alice Munro recently won the Nobel Prize for literature. I hadn’t read any Munro yet (!) so what better time than a Cannonball? I’m not sure what I can say that hasn’t already been said about Munro’s talent. It’s very hard to summarize this collection of stories and, indeed, Munro’s overall style.  She tells stories that don’t really have a beginning, middle, end; there’s no climax.  But they are remarkably real, and that’s what keeps you reading.  They are stories […]



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