Friend of My Youth

by Alice Munro

Overview

A “wickedly funny” (Newsweek) collection of ten short stories from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro, “one of the most eloquent and gifted writers of contemporary fiction” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times).

“Each of her collections demonstrates such linguistic skill, delicacy of vision, and . . . moral strength and clarity.”—Chicago Tribune
 
A woman haunted by dreams of her dead mother. An adulterous couple stepping over the line where the initial excitement ends and the pain begins. A widow visiting a Scottish village in search of her husband’s past—and instead discovering unsetting truths about a total stranger.
 
The miraculously accomplished stories in this collection not only astonish and delight, but also convey the unspoken mysteries at the heart of all human experience. The mastery—the almost numinous ability to say the unsayable—makes Friend of My Youth a genuine literary event.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679729570
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/07/1991
Series:	Vintage International
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	55,623
Product dimensions:	5.21(w) x 7.96(h) x 0.62(d)

About the Author

Alice Munro is the author of thirteen collections of stories—including Dear Life, Runaway, and Too Much Happiness—as well as a novel, Lives of Girls and Women. Among the many awards and prizes she received are three Governor General’s Literary Awards and two Giller Prizes in Canada; the Rea Award; the Lannan Literary Award; the National Book Critics Circle Award; and the International Booker Prize. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Alice Munro died in 2024.

Hometown:

Clinton, Ontario, and Comox, British Columbia

Date of Birth:

July 10, 1931

Place of Birth:

Wingham, Ontario, Canada

Education:

University of Western Ontario (no degree)

What People are Saying About This

Cynthia Oezizk

She is our Chekhov, and is going to outlast most of her contemporaries.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Alice Munro

“Her work felt revolutionary when I came to it, and it still does.”—Jhumpa Lahiri

“She is one of the handful of writers, some living, most dead, whom I have in mind when I say that fiction is my religion.”—Jonthan Franzen

“The authority she brings to the page is just lovely.”—Elizabeth Strout

“She’s the most savage writer I’ve ever read, also the most tender, the most honest, the most perceptive.”—Jeffery Eugenides

“Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.”—Julian Barnes

“She is a short-story writer who . . . reimagined what a story can do.”—Lorrie Moore

“There’s probably no one alive who’s better at the craft of the short story.”—Jim Shepard

“A true master of the form.”—Salman Rushdie

“A wonderful writer.”—Joyce Carol Oates

From the Publisher

Munro's ( The Progress of Love ) unfailing sense of the timeless propels the stories in her seventh book to the point of quiet revelation. Writing often of Canadians in the provinces who look back on years past from the vantage point of middle or old age, she tells of an elderly man attempting a discreet exit from his life; a widow who seeks a better understanding of her late husband in his former Scottish stomping grounds; and a daughter who relates and then recasts a classic tale of female self-denial handed down as an uncomfortable inheritance by her mother. The last, the volume's title story, is an especially insightful work, suggesting both the opposition and communion between art and experience--between a daughter who will write as she likes and a mother whose steely mask forbids her to. It is difficult to do justice to Munro's magical way with characterization or to her unerring control of her own resources: she writes about the forging and dismantling of friendships, marriages, families and solitudes with a trenchant knowledge of life and fiction as conspiring forces of creation. BOMC and QPB alternates. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Munro is an established author, one of the few who have mastered the art of short story writing. This fine collection contains ten stories that are all good to read. Most--but not all--are about the inhabitants of small Canadian towns. The primary characters, mainly women, have diverse relationships with their families and other unusual acquaintances. The plots are sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, but always within the realm of realism. Very seldom does anything occur that seems too ridiculous to actually have happened to somebody one knows. Most readers will find these stories entertaining and often thought-provoking. Recommended for libraries already owning Munro's previous works and also for those that may have missed her in the past. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/89.-- Mary Prokop, CEL Regional Lib., Savannah, Ga.

Library Journal

One of the most eloquent and gifted writers of contemporary fiction...A wonderful collection of stories, beautifully written and deeply felt. -- The New York Times

Michiko Kakutani

Alice Munro's short stories are economical, tightly written studies in female psychology. That may make them sound dull, but it shouldn't --it just means that their impact comes from the author's nuanced characters and her depiction of their emotions, not the events of the plot. In this recording of Munro's 1990 collection, Beth Fowler fails to bring these women off the page. Her narration is too slow, too schoolmarmish, and the voices she ascribes to the characters are leaden and unconvincing. This writing needs a more thoughtful interpretation than Fowler is able to bring. D.B. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine

JUN/JUL 01 - AudioFile