Friend of My Youth

by Alice Munro

Overview

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE® IN LITERATURE 2013

The ten miraculously accomplished stories in Alice Munro's Friend of My Youth not only astonish and delight but also convey the unspoken mysteries at the heart of all human experience.

"[Friend of My Youth is] a wonderful collection of stories, beautifully written and deeply felt."—Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679729570
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/07/1991
Series:	Vintage International
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	288,052
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published thirteen collections of stories as well as a novel, Lives of Girls and Women, and two volumes of Selected Stories. During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including three of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards and two of its Giller Prizes, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Lannan Literary Award, England’s W. H. Smith Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Man Booker International Prize. In 2013 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, Granta, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. She lives in Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron. 

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 from fellow writers:

“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.” —Loorie 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