{"id":8078,"date":"2012-11-13T01:02:58","date_gmt":"2012-11-13T05:02:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=8078"},"modified":"2017-08-04T17:06:32","modified_gmt":"2017-08-04T21:06:32","slug":"alice-munro-dear-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2012\/11\/13\/alice-munro-dear-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Alice Munro: Dear Life<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Dear Life<\/strong><\/em> <\/span>
\nby Alice Munro (2012) <\/span>
\nKnopf (2012) <\/span>
\n319 pp<\/span><\/p><\/h3><\/div>

Alice Munro’s new collection of short stories, Dear Life<\/em>, is out today. I don’t know how many more Munro short stories we’re going to get since she is 81 and has\u00a0threatened retirement before (thankfully, she didn’t carry through). Munro is my favorite living author. Her stories are\u00a0both bitter and compassionate. Though on the surface they may seem traditional as they dwell on the seemingly simple but ultimately terrifying ordinary moments in life, they are structurally, syntactically, and thematically ambitious. They\u00a0don’t leave me, so this release is a big deal.<\/p>\n

Rather than post a review of the\u00a0collection as a whole, I’d like to make this post a kind of anchor index. Several of the stories were published in The New Yorker<\/em> over the last couple of years, so I already have reviews of them complete with a string of rich comments from others.\u00a0Here I’m going to link to those reviews\u00a0and then review each\u00a0remaining story in Dear Life<\/em> on its own over the next little while. As I post reviews, I will update the links below. In the end, below I will post some final thoughts on the collection as a whole.<\/p>\n