These are beguiling, provocative stories about manipulative men and the women who outwit them, about destructive marriages and curdled friendships, about mothers and sons, about moments which change or haunt a life. Alice Munro's stories surprise and delight, turning lives into art, expanding our world and shedding light on the strange workings of the human heart.
Too Much Happiness
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"She writes with a beautiful, mathematical clarity, an elemental humanity and a marvellous, limpid, funny, apprehension of what goes on" (Jane Shilling Sunday Telegraph)
"Some of the most honest, intuitive and exacting fiction, long or short, of our time" (Tom Gatti The Times)
"Munro's bold, unflinching narratives have taken the short story places many a novelist has feared to tread... That she does this in a style both calm and deliberate, fluid yet tightly controlled, stark yet compassionate, is what makes her insights into the human condition so profound" (Mary Crockett Scotsman)
"Written with veteran assurance, brimming with intensely believable characters and rich social detail, these dispatches from the most unsparing reaches of Munro's imagination confirm her acclaimed place on the highest ground of contemporary fiction" (Peter Kemp Sunday Times)
"Alice Munro commands enormous respect and almost uncritical adoration from her readers" (Elaine Showalter Literary Review)
"Some of the most honest, intuitive and exacting fiction, long or short, of our time" (Tom Gatti The Times)
"Munro's bold, unflinching narratives have taken the short story places many a novelist has feared to tread... That she does this in a style both calm and deliberate, fluid yet tightly controlled, stark yet compassionate, is what makes her insights into the human condition so profound" (Mary Crockett Scotsman)
"Written with veteran assurance, brimming with intensely believable characters and rich social detail, these dispatches from the most unsparing reaches of Munro's imagination confirm her acclaimed place on the highest ground of contemporary fiction" (Peter Kemp Sunday Times)
"Alice Munro commands enormous respect and almost uncritical adoration from her readers" (Elaine Showalter Literary Review)
Book Description
A brilliant, compelling new collection from one of the world's greatest living short-story writers, and winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2009.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Alice Munro is my favourite living short story writer, and this collection does not disappoint except, strangely for the long title story. Unlike the other contemporary pieces, this one is set in the nineteenth century and centres on the real-life Sophia Kovalevsky, a Russian mathematician and novelist. The story simply did not come to life for me, and it seems out of place among the rest of the collection, though Munro clearly wants to draw attention to it through the title. Other readers may be entirely captivated by the romantic complications Sophia faces; I am perfectly ready to accept that the fault is my own, but all criticism is subjective.
The other stories are set in familiar Munro territory - in and around Ontario, focusing on small lives - but nothing is ever quite familiar with this writer, who has the unerring ability to unsettle us, often by examining the brittleness of relationships, sometimes by the placing of quirky incidents in seemingly ordinary circumstancess, as here in the story 'Wenlock Edge' where a student takes her friend's usual place as a solitary guest in a wealthy man's home and is invited, quite coolly and charmingly, to dine with him completely naked. Equally oddly, she complies, without knowing why, and nothing happens - the man continues conversational and correct throughout the meal. The perverse strangeness of it reminded me of Pip's visits to Miss Havisham in 'Great Expectations'.
I believe Miss Munro has said this will be her last book. She is 75, but I do hope there's more to come from her yet. As readers of her work, we can't have too much happiness.
This review is by David Williams writerinthenorth
The other stories are set in familiar Munro territory - in and around Ontario, focusing on small lives - but nothing is ever quite familiar with this writer, who has the unerring ability to unsettle us, often by examining the brittleness of relationships, sometimes by the placing of quirky incidents in seemingly ordinary circumstancess, as here in the story 'Wenlock Edge' where a student takes her friend's usual place as a solitary guest in a wealthy man's home and is invited, quite coolly and charmingly, to dine with him completely naked. Equally oddly, she complies, without knowing why, and nothing happens - the man continues conversational and correct throughout the meal. The perverse strangeness of it reminded me of Pip's visits to Miss Havisham in 'Great Expectations'.
I believe Miss Munro has said this will be her last book. She is 75, but I do hope there's more to come from her yet. As readers of her work, we can't have too much happiness.
This review is by David Williams writerinthenorth
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
By LaLoba
Format:Paperback
I don't usually read anthologies of short stories so I don't have a benchmark to compare the stories in this book to, but I have been left feeling slightly disappointed after each story except perhaps for "Free Radicals" and "Deep-Holes". I found that the stories tended to hook me in and my interest in the characters and plot would build up to fever pitch, and then......not a lot would happen. It almost felt like, with each story, the author had started off writing a novel and then remembered a few pages in that she was supposed to be writing a short story, so she just abandoned the characters and the plot, at times very abruptly.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
`This might even turn into a funny story that she would tell some day.'
4 Nov 2011
By J. Cameron-Smith
TOP 500 REVIEWER
Format:Paperback
When I picked up this collection of ten short stories by Alice Munro, I had no idea what I was letting myself in for. This, courtesy of a reading group, was my first encounter with Ms Munro's fiction.
After I read the first story, `Dimensions', I put the book down for almost a week. I was not sufficiently optimistic about Doree's future to be comfortable with the possibility of a new beginning. The ending to Doree's story took me by surprise, and I wanted more before moving on. At the rate of one story a day, I finished the book. Each of these stories made an impact and, a number of them made me uncomfortable - especially the relationships in `Wenlock Edge' and the cruelty of children in `Child's Play'. I found `Too Much Happiness' quite different from the other stories, and it didn't work as well for me. While I'm interested in learning more about Sophia Kovalevsky, a 19th century Russian mathematician, as a consequence - I couldn't be sure where fact ended and fiction began. For some reason I found this distracting.
The two stories I liked best were `Face' - with its male narrator and his disfiguring birthmark, and `Wood', the story of Roy and Lea.
`You think that would have changed things? The answer is of course, and for a while, and never.'
In most of the stories, knowledge comes to the reader in pieces as the story moves between present and past. In each of the stories we see events and relationships as the characters, mostly female, remember (and sometimes reinterpret) them. I did not like most of these characters, but what they did (or how they reacted) often made an uncomfortable form of sense as the stories unfolded.... Read more ›
After I read the first story, `Dimensions', I put the book down for almost a week. I was not sufficiently optimistic about Doree's future to be comfortable with the possibility of a new beginning. The ending to Doree's story took me by surprise, and I wanted more before moving on. At the rate of one story a day, I finished the book. Each of these stories made an impact and, a number of them made me uncomfortable - especially the relationships in `Wenlock Edge' and the cruelty of children in `Child's Play'. I found `Too Much Happiness' quite different from the other stories, and it didn't work as well for me. While I'm interested in learning more about Sophia Kovalevsky, a 19th century Russian mathematician, as a consequence - I couldn't be sure where fact ended and fiction began. For some reason I found this distracting.
The two stories I liked best were `Face' - with its male narrator and his disfiguring birthmark, and `Wood', the story of Roy and Lea.
`You think that would have changed things? The answer is of course, and for a while, and never.'
In most of the stories, knowledge comes to the reader in pieces as the story moves between present and past. In each of the stories we see events and relationships as the characters, mostly female, remember (and sometimes reinterpret) them. I did not like most of these characters, but what they did (or how they reacted) often made an uncomfortable form of sense as the stories unfolded.... Read more ›
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
By Antenna
TOP 500 REVIEWER
Format:Paperback
I have heard Alice Munro described so often as one of the greatest contemporary short story writers that I had high expectations for this book. The length of the stories surprised me, together with her frequent tendency to ramble from what seems to be the main thread of each tale. Then there is the tendency to skim in a few pages through decades of a character's life, often telling us what to make of people and situations, rather than implying or revealing these aspects. Yet from the outset I thought I could see the reasons for Munro's fame in her easy, confident and very readable style, the rapid building up of situations and characters, the occasional very insightful comments which chime with one's own experience of life, clarifying some point which has lain dormant in one's own mind, and one suddenly recognises to be true.
I was held by the continuous sense that a story is heading somewhere meaningful and thought provoking, and by the knowledge that, at any point, she may insert some dark and shocking event: a man murders his children in a jealous rage, a widow realises that the gas man she has admitted to her house is in fact a crazed killer. I suspect that most people will find that some stories leave them cold, but they are moved by a few to which they can particularly relate, such as a mother's sense of loss before steeling herself to accept that her son has "dropped out" to become an anarchist.... Read more ›
I was held by the continuous sense that a story is heading somewhere meaningful and thought provoking, and by the knowledge that, at any point, she may insert some dark and shocking event: a man murders his children in a jealous rage, a widow realises that the gas man she has admitted to her house is in fact a crazed killer. I suspect that most people will find that some stories leave them cold, but they are moved by a few to which they can particularly relate, such as a mother's sense of loss before steeling herself to accept that her son has "dropped out" to become an anarchist.... Read more ›
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3.7 out of 5 stars
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Another collection from the consummate short story writer
A collection to be read and then read again. She is my favourite writer of short stories. A Canadian author who uses the landscape as the background to the the range of human... Read more
Published 2 months ago by Tess
4.0 out of 5 stars
Engaging collection
I knew Alice Munro from her earlier book, Runaway. This collection is of an equally high standard - the tales are unusual but also realistic and engaging. I will be reading more.
Published 7 months ago by MMP
3.0 out of 5 stars
A very weird title as happiness is the least you find in it!
All characters seem unreal and all relations negative, but the language is good and the stories well told. Read more
Published 7 months ago by Ingela
2.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing
I feel most of what I would have said about Alice Munro "Too much Happiness" has already be covered, particularly in the review by Antenna. Read more
Published 20 months ago by bubble
5.0 out of 5 stars
Undiminished excellence...
I first discovered Alice Munro by reading The Love Of A Good Woman. The second volume that I've read was Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. Read more
Published 21 months ago by John P. Jones III
5.0 out of 5 stars
If I could write
If I could write short stories, these would be they: crafted to perfection, elegant understated language, and quirky stories. Read more
Published on 7 Jun 2011 by HildaB
4.0 out of 5 stars
Alice Munro...a lotta happiness!
I have read many Alice Munro short stories and they have all been excellent. This is no exception and i hope there is much more to come! Read more
Published on 5 May 2011 by SACB
3.0 out of 5 stars
Too "little" of too much happiness
The title story made this book worth the buy.
The rest of the stories left me with a ....did
I miss something...feeling. Read more
The rest of the stories left me with a ....did
I miss something...feeling. Read more
Published on 13 Mar 2011 by dorok
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