The highest rated book from my 2020 reading was an Alice Munro story collection, so why not start 2021 with an overview of her early career? Selected Stories covers Munro's first few decades, with stories from the 1960s through the 1990s in roughly chronological order.
Even the earliest stories are accomplished, but they become more ambitious over time. It is interesting to see Munro's development. Stories from the same time often share the same narrative strategies; for example, stories from the mid 80s start and end with the narrator describing their relationship with their parents then flash back to a story from when the parents were young.
Munro writes classic New Yorker-style stories," which I recently heard characterized as "a tale in which nothing much happens to one or more not especially interesting people until it all ends on a note of melancholy ambiguity." What makes her work distinctive is how the key moments arrive obliquely relative to the main story. For example, "The Moons of Jupiter" is about the narrator's father, but the epiphany (for me anyway) comes when the narrator starts withdrawing her tenderness from her daughter with leukemia. Munro is like an illusionist, misdirecting our attention in order to spring a surprise.
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