Dear Life: Stories
Written by Alice Munro
Narrated by Kimberly Farr and Arthur Morey
4/5
()
Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this audiobook
A brilliant new collection of stories from one of the most acclaimed and beloved writers of our time.
Alice Munro's peerless ability to give us the essence of a life in often brief but always spacious and timeless stories is once again everywhere apparent in this brilliant new collection. In story after story, she illumines the moment a life is forever altered by a chance encounter or an action not taken, or by a simple twist of fate that turns a person out of his or her accustomed path and into a new way of being or thinking. A poet, finding herself in alien territory at her first literary party, is rescued by a seasoned newspaper columnist, and is soon hurtling across the continent, young child in tow, toward a hoped-for but completely unplanned meeting. A young soldier, returning to his fiancée from the Second World War, steps off the train before his stop and onto the farm of another woman, beginning a life on the move. A wealthy young woman having an affair with the married lawyer hired by her father to handle his estate comes up with a surprising way to deal with the blackmailer who finds them out.
While most of these stories take place in Munro's home territory-the small Canadian towns around Lake Huron-the characters sometimes venture to the cities, and the audiobook ends with four pieces set in the area where she grew up, and in the time of her own childhood: stories "autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact." A girl who can't sleep imagines night after wakeful night that she kills her beloved younger sister. A mother snatches up her child and runs for dear life when a crazy woman comes into her yard.
Suffused with Munro's clarity of vision and her unparalleled gift for storytelling, these tales about departures and beginnings, accidents and dangers, and outgoings and homecomings both imagined and real, paint a radiant, indelible portrait of how strange, perilous, and extraordinary ordinary life can be.
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Reviews for Dear Life
539 ratings52 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This collection of stories just didn't grab me like I expected them to. For me, they were only mildly interesting looks at life, at best. The final, semi-autobiographical stories were the ones I liked most. Ms Munro is a well-known and revered writer, but perhaps I am just not the right audience. I do admit that short stories don't usually satisfy me as well as lengthier works, so you may enjoy them much more than I did. Although I finished the book, I was somewhat relieved when I was done with it.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5How to "review" short stories by a Nobel Prize winner? I can't. Typical Munro: wives, adulterers, young women, old women, I like the male protagonist story. People living life. Snippets of lives that you might conceive was looking out the window of the car/train/bus/house. Good.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5For me, it was just ok. Maybe because the short stories didn't grab me immediately and it was hard to get into them in that short of a period, I'm not sure. She did have beautiful details and ideas, and I never doubted the creativity of the work.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Alice Munro is a powerful storyteller. Her short stories amaze me. Using uncomplicated language, she moves effortlessly around in time and place. The autobiographical pieces were wonderful. I listened to it all on a rather long car journey. I'm looking forward to reading her words myself.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A selection of short stories a sub set of which are introduced as being biographical in feeling if not in fact. There's a lot of uncertainty in these stories, there is very little resolution and a sense of something being out of reach. They have a sense of place, though, and feel to be set in a past time. It's not up beat, but it is enveloping.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Heard as an audiobook, and the reader's measured accent was just right for the (seemingly) measured pace of the stories. It was good to listen to while driving, off & on, which enforced a pause between stories. At some point I did think that she keeps going on and on about details which really don't have a point, but I may have been more accepting if I had been able to read this.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Dear Life is a highly interesting book, comprised of concisely written stories that tell so much about this complicated thing called life.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Excellent stories but so much melancholy!! Just once, I wanted one of these very polite, very suppressed Canadian women (and girls) to scream as loudly as they could and tell everyone to go to hell. Reading these stories made me feel as though I was wearing a straitjacket, which may testify to their brilliance, but makes me never, ever, ever want to read any more Alice Munro. Pardon me while I go burn my bra and march in the streets now.
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- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Wonderful. Hard to pick favourites, but stand-outs include: 'Train', 'Amundsen', 'Leaving Maverley' and 'In Sight of the Lake'.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Munro's stories are so comfortable, you feel deeply familiar with the characters even within these short pieces. Yet she often takes an unexpected turn. The most memorable is "Train" in which a soldier returning from war gets off the train before reaching home and the young woman who is waiting for him. Instead, he picks up a life with a lonely woman, takes care of her and their home, and then suddenly... I won't spoil it. Beautiful writing and characterization.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I can't really think of much to say about this one except that it is amazing and one of the best examples I've ever come across of a writer who can write about very little happening to ordinary people and still render it beautiful and heartbreaking.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Munro is my favorite short story writers. I love her concise style. I'm from southwestern Ontario and I think her writing style accurately captures the personalities of the people there. Her stories typically include some interesting twists. I found I could empathize with many characters in these stories.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5I read about half of the short stories in this book before giving up. I love bleak and depressing stories, but this just wasn't depressing enough, or perhaps it wasn't depressing in the right way.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I am not a lover of short stories and only read this because it was on our Book Group list. Alice Munro is such a beautiful writer that I couldn't help enjoying the book but how I wish that she had written a novel instead. I am left at the end of every story with a feeling of frustration of wanting to hear More More More of the characters.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5DEAR LIFE is a collection of short stories that shows the simple lives of ordinary people and the way they handle challenges. As evidenced by her many awards, Alice Munro is a fantastic writer, and I don't know that I have ever read a short story collection that is so even. Although different stories had greater appeal for me on a personal level, the writing style and message is consistent throughout. The three-star rating is a reflection of the effect on me of the overall bleak tone of the collection and my frustration with the nebulous conclusions of many of the stories.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I agree that these stories were just so bleak but also that Alice Munro is such a very good writer. Good for a day at home I guess.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Nice wintertime short stories.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I'm going have to admit that I was a bit disappointed with Alice Munro's Dear Life: Stories. While I had originally liked the idea of the connecting theme of older characters looking back at their life growing up and falling in and out of love or sometimes both in rural Canada, it did grow tiresome after awhile.
I am young but I have been able to read nostalgic fiction without feeling such a boring distance before. With every story, I sighed and resigned myself to the fact that there was yet another story about an old person looking back at their life growing up in Canada.
However, after the first disasterous and very boring story about an adulterous housewife, Munro's stories did get better. She reached a good stride from Leaving Maverley onward. I believe Munro reached her zenith with Dolly. That story about a wife fretting when her common law husband reconnects with an old love, the eponymous Dolly, was clever, funny, and well-written. It energized me because I was falling asleep.
I guess I expected more from a Nobel Prize winner. I expected Dear Life: Stories to be epic. What I got was cotton candy: all right but in no way, shape, or form, susitenence. Perhaps this book is one of those times I need to be older to enjoy it. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I listened to these short stories on the way to work. Although I am not a short story fan, Monro proved herself a master in the art, I found myself thinking about some of these stories long after I listened to them.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Alice Munro's stories always satisfy, those I didn't find this collection as compelling as earlier ones.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Joy's review: It was great to discuss this in our book group just a few days before Munro won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I found every story in this collection to be thought and emotion provoking. Munro's style is understated and yet never fails to paint a vivid picture of the individuals in each story. It's clear from her stories about 'ordinary people' that Munro thinks that there is no such thing as a boring person. There are no boring stories here either.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Alice Munro is a powerful storyteller. Her short stories amaze me. Using uncomplicated language, she moves effortlessly around in time and place. The autobiographical pieces were wonderful. I listened to it all on a rather long car journey. I'm looking forward to reading her words myself.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A collection of short stories set in mid-20th century Ontario.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Most of these short stories were not of the quality of interest I am used to Alice Munro writing. The writing was not outstanding, and the content was less interesting than other stories she has written.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5These are splendid short stories, but I especially liked the autobiographical 'fragments' at the end of the book.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Raced through this is 2 days. A gorgeous, personal, quiet book. Alice Munro is one of the very few authors who gets better with every new book, even when it seems impossible that she can get better. Reading Munro is like living inside another person's skin, not because that person's life is like your own (to the contrary, none of the characters are living a life at all famliliar to this reader) but because somehow she injects the reader with empathy which allows one to find common ground and walk in someone else's shoes for 30 pages or so. Wow.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5If you read publishers notes on any collection of Munro's stories, the descriptions sound very much alike. And after reading a handful of collections myself, while enjoying them all, they do resemble one another in tone, feeling, and content. There is a strong sense of time, usually the distant, but not too distant past. While some stories take place in the present, many are grounded in our parents or grandparents' time. And her stories are distinctly Canadian, English speaking rather than Francophone Quebecois, usually set in small towns or the countryside, though Toronto makes an appearance or two. Even now, a visit to Gaspe, New Brunswick, Newfoundland, or another Canadian province will give you a greater sense of these rural settings. And World War II is almost like a character of its own in many of her stories, the backdrop of much of the action, a force that molds and shapes peoples lives in many ways. But Dear God, Dear Life does stand out in one way. It struck me as a bit more depressing than other collections. The overriding theme of these 14 tales is Munro "pinpoints the moment a person is forever altered by a chance encounter, and action not taken, or a simple twist of fate." So get ready for stories that deal with people running from others and themselves, a drowned child, alzheimer's, fantasies of strangulation, fear of a child being kidnapped, ...and the list goes on and on.
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- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Outstanding
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I am so happy that Ms. Munro won the Noble she is a wonderful writer. I enjoyed these stories, each story has the depth of a novel. there seems to tone of sadness in these stories. not tragic but lonely and a little sad
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- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wenn es um das Genre American Shortstories geht, ist Alice Munro eine wahre Meisterin. Die Literaturnobelpreisträgerin versteht es Spannungsbögen gepaart mit stilistischer Raffinesse zu erzeugen. Die Geschichten spielen fast ausnahmslos in den 1950- und 1960-Jahren, viele der Themen sind aber zeitlos. Berührend und informativ zugleich ist der letzte Teil des Buchs, in dem Munro in mehreren Geschichten viel von sich selbst preisgibt. Ich bin eigentlich kein Fan von Shortstories, aber in dem Fall sind sie eine echte Empfehlung.