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Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014 (Vintage International) Paperback – September 15, 2015
Author: Alice Munro ID: 1101872357

Review

“What a stunning, subtle and sympathetic explorer of the heart Munro is.” —The Washington Post

“Generations to come will relish and study Family Furnishings. . . . A superb introduction for those new to her work, and a reminder to longtime fans that Munro is a writer to be cherished.” —NPR

“Brilliant. . . . In the simplest of words, and with the greatest of power, she makes us see and hear an ‘unremarkable’ scene we will never forget.” —The New York Review of Books 
 
“Turn to just about any page and you’ll discover a brilliant insight into human behavior. . . . Family Furnishings reminds us that Munro is our greatest contemporary short story writer.” —USA Today

“[An] extraordinary collection. . . . Munro seems to have gotten hold of our own darkest feelings about the people in our lives and transformed them, gloriously, into art.” —San Francisco Chronicle
 
“The preeminent short-fiction writer of her time. . . . Astonishing. . . . Stunning. . . . Remind[s] us that fiction, at its most profound and moving, is about human endurance, which makes it very much a reflection of reality.” —Los Angeles Times
 
“Munro’s literary genius for the short-story form has been widely deemed incomparable. The Canadian writer captures those small moments that reverberate through ordinary lives in meticulous prose. Her economy in words fashions a language that pierces the heart.” —New York Daily News
 
“These are human stories, and great ones. . . . Nobody can tell a tale, spin a character, break a heart, the way Alice Munro can.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune
 
“Munro may have arrived at the end of her career, but her stories keep changing, as works of art tend to do. . . . Because Munro’s people often act unpredictably—they wind up doing things they hadn’t known they were going to do and startle themselves—the stories, even on repeated readings, retain their original suspense, their sense that anything can happen.” —The New York Times Book Review
 
“If there’s literary pleasure greater than reading Alice Munro, it must be rereading Alice Munro.” —The Seattle Times
 
“It is no exaggeration to state that Munro’s short stories are among the finest that have ever been written. She’s sure to endure alongside Poe, Hemingway and O’Connor. . . . She’s that rare writer who is able to match her early career achievements and even top them.” —The Dallas Morning News
 
“A writer who slowly fashioned a house of fiction large enough for both a room of her own and all of her family furnishings—ensuring that she herself had space to maneuver while others still had plenty of space to stretch out and live. Those others include us, her very lucky readers.” — The Philadelphia Inquirer  
 
“Munro’s stories are remarkable for their evocation of places and the people who live there, for ambiguities, their ellipses, and their deftness. Her prose is lucid: ranging from delicacy to forthright attack, sometimes witty, ironic.” —The Washington Times

About the Author

Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published thirteen collections of stories and a novel. During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards, including two Giller Prizes, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Man Booker International Prize. In 2013 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Magazine, The Paris Review, Granta, and many other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages.

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Series: Vintage InternationalPaperback: 784 pagesPublisher: Vintage; Reprint edition (September 15, 2015)Language: EnglishISBN-10: 1101872357ISBN-13: 978-1101872352 Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 1.4 x 8 inches Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies) Best Sellers Rank: #25,933 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #790 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Short Stories & Anthologies > Short Stories #2744 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Literary #2812 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Women’s Fiction > Contemporary Women
My three favorite North American short story writers are John Cheever, Tobias Wolff, and Alice Munro. Of the three, Munro’s stories are a bigger challenge. Often her plot points are elliptical. She slowly and leisurely lets her genius unfold her sprawling stories, often close to 40 pages long, piece by piece, so that her style can present a challenge to one’s patience. But the patience pays off because more than Cheever and Wolff, Munro has this brilliant and rare gift to make a 30-40-page short story feel as if you’ve immersed yourself in a life with a sense of completeness that you could only imagine with a 400-page novel.

If you’re new to Munro, you might open this 600-page book and begin with some of her more accessible stories first:

“My Mother’s Dream”: An unusual point of view of a girl thinking back to her being a baby and almost dying after her father dies and family and friends converge on the grieving mother. It’s almost as if the first-person narrator, clearly too young as an infant to grasp the details of this period, gleans what she knows from family and friends when she gets into her teens.

“Family Furnishings”: A story about social class and the “city” vs. the “country,” this tale is about a larger than life character, the narrator’s older cousin Alfrida, who lives in the big city where she creates a squeaky-clean person as an advice columnist. The disparity between her newspaper persona and her gimlet-eyed cynical self is not only funny but is central to the story’s theme about the loss of innocence.

“The Bear Came Over the Mountain”: A story of a professor and his wife who succumbs to dementia and the complex, knotty love they have for each other even after the wife is institutionalized.
Like many other readers, I have always been in awe of Alice Munro, whose short stories are just so well-crafted that each of them sparkles like a little gem.

In collection after collection, her strength has always been taking ordinary human lives and extricating that one moment of revelation. In just a few beautifully written sentences, she’s able to define a person in a totally original way.

Take this description, from The Bear Came Over The Mountain: “Getting close to Marian would present a different problem. It would be like biting into a litchi nut. The flesh with its oddly artificial allure, its chemical taste and perfume, shallow over the extensive seed, the stone.”

Now this Nobel Laureate has assembled some of her most memorable stories from 1995-2014, with a forward from Jane Smiley. And it gives this reader yet one more reason to rejoice. In the words of Ms. Smiley, “Munro…has made of the short story something new, using precision of language and complexity of emotion to cut out the relaxed parts of the novel and focus on the essence of transformation.”

These are stories to savor, brimming with life and recreating the definition of what a short story is all about. Sometimes, she courageously turns the spotlight on her own life: The View from Castle Rock, for example, finds her mining her family history and meshing imagination and fact…the eponymous Family Furnishings reveals a young writer who steals the poignant, personal and painful history of an eccentric aunt to further her craft.
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