Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories

ISBN: 0375727434

Author: Munro, Alice

Condition: New

NATIONAL BESTSELLER From Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro come nine short stories with the intimacy of a family photo album and the organic feel of real life (The New York Times)In Munros hands, as in Chekhovs, a short story is more than big enough to hold the world-and to astonish us, again and again.-Chicago TribuneFINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD A TIME BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMESS 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURYIn the nine breathtaking stories that make up this collection, Alice Munro creates narratives that loop and swerve like memory, conjuring up characters as thorny and contradictory as people we know ourselves.The fate of a strong-minded housekeeper with a frizz of reddish hair, just entering the dangerous country of old-maidhood, is unintentionally (and deliciously) reversed by a teenaged girls practical joke. A college student visiting her aunt for the first time and recognizing the family furniture stumbles on a long-hidden secret and its meaning in her own life. An inveterate philanderer finds the tables turned when he puts his wife into an old-age home. A young cancer patient stunned by good news discovers a perfect bridge to her suddenly regained future. A woman recollecting an afternoons wild lovemaking with a stranger realizes how the memory of that encounter has both changed for her and sustained her through a lifetime.Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is Munro at her best-tirelessly observant, serenely free of illusion, deeply and gloriously humane.