[HP6]⇒ PDF Gratis My Best Stories Alice Munro Margaret Atwood 9780143170396 Books

My Best Stories Alice Munro Margaret Atwood 9780143170396 Books

Download As PDF : My Best Stories Alice Munro Margaret Atwood 9780143170396 Books

My Best Stories Alice Munro Margaret Atwood 9780143170396 Books

I have read some of this volume, not all. What I have read thus far has been very well-crafted. A brilliant wordsmith, Munro paints scenes and grows characters which come vividly to life in the mind of the reader. If all literature were this will crafted, the world would be a significantly more rewarding place to inhabit.


Tags : My Best Stories [Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers.  My Best Stories   </i> is a dazzling selection of stories—seventeen favourites chosen by the author from across her distinguished career. The stories are arranged in the order in which they were written,Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood,My Best Stories,Penguin Canada,0143170392,G0143170392I5N00,Fiction General

My Best Stories Alice Munro Margaret Atwood 9780143170396 Books Reviews

If I were given only two words to describe Alice Munro's achievement 'prosaic perfection' would have to be it.

I admit it was thoroughly snobbish of me. It took my own Canadian citizenship, an eminent literature professor's laudatory (and hortatory) analysis, and ' as though these were not enough ' a Nobel Prize to get acquainted and instantly become besotted with Alice Munro's literary genius.

Yes. Once I looked, it was love at first sight.

'My Best Stories' is a mixed bag, but it is a potent mix. It commences with 'Royal Beatings' of a 'nine, ten, eleven, twelve' year-old Rosie. These all-too-common fatherly affections left such a bloody imprint on her psyche that even a master like Munro could not contain here to a single story. The 'Stories' continue pausing in 'Miles City, Montana' (perhaps the most philosophical pit stop in the collection) where a child's near-death experience forces a mother to an existential what-if blame game. 'Differently' is another story with a philosophical bend, but exploring alternate modus vivendi, one in which we and the people we truly care about were actually (not just conceptually) mortal, it aspires to applied rather than speculative philosophy. 'Wilderness Station' is a Cain and Able story with a twist and an axe that cuts deep into the future while 'Vandals' is a subtle but thoroughly disturbing sexual abuse story.

The penultimate story in the collection, 'Runaway', is pure literary perfection. Yes, the prof that introduced me to Munro did so with this story, but, having finally read it, I must admit that do not think that reading a 400-page novel could engender as much emotional kerfuffle as Munro did in these mere 35 pages.

The final story, 'The Bear that came over the Mountain', is unusual on two accounts. First (although it is about a woman) it is told from a man's perspective, and second, it is a quirky love story that depicts a woman who paradoxically finds her love only after having lost everything else, including her very self.

These, it should be stated, are just my notable mentions each of which easily pays the price of admission to the entire collection. But note that, masterful plots and tabloid-worthy-life- shattering events are the least reasons you invest yourself in them.

The Devil is in the Details

One of the first thing that strikes a reader about Munro's stories is her obsessive and fastidious attention to detail. 'The smell of cedar bush', a surreptitious look, 'a squashed leaf' or 'a Popsicle stick' matter to her because she knows that despite our ostensible fascination with tawdry extremism it is precisely these minute and seemingly insignificant details that weave any semblance of meaning into our otherwise meaningless lives.

Free Will?

Reflecting back I see that the invocations of Spinoza in the 'Royal Beatings' which opens this collection might not have been wholly adventitious. The self-making, progressive, and free willing individuals we are taught to see ourselves as are the very pillars of a society where jurisprudence, morality, and progress are possible. But Munro courts the Spinoza-like notion that the forces which drive our actions are, essentially, alien to us; that self-help may be self-delusion, and that free will is nothing more than the past inexorably willing itself on to the present all the while feigning volition.

It is, after all, this burden of history that drives the 'royally' abused Rosie to her future sadomasochistic tendencies in 'The Beggar Maid'; that engenders 'a tongue-tied' grandchildren to a murderous grandfather in the 'Wilderness Station', and that explains a seemingly inexplicable rampage of the saintly born-again Christians in 'Vandals'. As Georgia, a character in 'Differently', succinctly puts it 'People make momentous shifts, but not the changes they imagine'.

Indeed, 'shift' are not 'changes' but realizing this ' as Spinoza urges us to, understanding our limitations, and discovering the forces that surreptitiously force themselves on us maybe the only freedom we actually have. To put it another way (as the aforementioned stories suggest) while we may be products we are also producers - and herein lies the possibility of ethics.

The Rosetta Stone to a Woman's Soul

Each story in the collection is its own, self-enclosed, moral arena. We may crave clarity, resolve, and moral rectitude but, much like in the world around us, there are not saints nor martyrs in Munro's universes. As their (re)creator she (and each of her characters) is profoundly moral but never moralizing.

There is only one sacrosanct commandment that guides Munro's Promethean project and that is to pour the ineffable essence a woman's soul on the page and allow the reader to taste and delight in it. It is - and I am not being hyperbolic - a well-nigh tactile experience and one would be a fool not to indulge in it.
I chose this book because I was attending a class about Classical Writers.
Some of the stories were excellent. Quite an effort to read ALL the stories.
As usual...a good read.
We read My Best Stories for book group and loved it. I am still finishing it but enjoying every minute of these Canadian tales.
I have read some of this volume, not all. What I have read thus far has been very well-crafted. A brilliant wordsmith, Munro paints scenes and grows characters which come vividly to life in the mind of the reader. If all literature were this will crafted, the world would be a significantly more rewarding place to inhabit.