Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Short Story Collection by Alice Munro | Literary Fiction for Book Clubs & Reading Enthusiasts

I'm not normally a big fan of short stories, since many become simple ramblings and can come off as without much plot or character development. However, Alice Munro is a master short story teller and she certainly deserves all the literary prizes that she's been awarded during her writing career, including the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature. Her stories are tightly and masterfully constructed to entertain and challenge the places in our hearts that we often try to keep to ourselves.Using extremely skillful and varied literary techniques, Alice Munro shares with us the realities of ordinary lives and what it means to be human. Even though her settings are mostly centered on small town Canada, and over several decades, her characters are widely varied and depict the lives that surround the readers' own lives. Anyone can easily relate to Alice Munro's tales and enjoy her gift for storytellling, at its highest level.Typically, Ms. Munro's stories depict Everywoman and Everyman, especially the former. Many of Alice Munro's story lines taunt the reader to go down into potentially maudlin and darker places of the human heart, as the reader begins to empathize with the characters' life crises, successes and challenges. Many characters' travails and/or triumphs can sometimes bring the reader to tears, near to laughter and often relief. The stories' small town settings are fraught with the usual array of background characters and everyday life events. As the story lines march along, the conflicts among characters, or within the characters themselves, reshape their hopes and dreams. Typically, Ms. Munro suddenly and dramatically alters her characters' lives, when life decisions and situations threaten to crush the characters' spirits and rip apart their potentially happy and secure futures.However, as her stories prepare to conclude, Ms. Munro skillfully brings her main characters' courage into play, so that their altered lives can redeem their pasts, as they reach out to others, thus changing themselves and setting the tempo for a more mature, informed and hopeful future. One could not go wrong with a few hours spent within the life and times of Alice Munro's Everyman and Everywoman. She's a true master of the short story.For those who enjoy Alice Munro's stories, the novelists Barbara Kingsolver and Anne Tyler are also excellent authors whose characters' also meander along everyday paths. Their main characters' existence also amble along into the same fulfillment and redemption of ordinary lives that Ms. Munro wishes to depict..