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Runaway
Stories
by Alice Munro
The acclaimed Canadian short story writer returns with a collection of eight new tales featuring female protagonists.
Knopf, 352 pages
10/26/2004
$25.00
ISBN: 140004281X
Fiction
Short Stories
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Houston Chronicle Lisa Jennifer Selzman
Munro's gift is her ability to reflect the inner lives of women, layer unto layer, culminating in a moment of revelation both quiet and shattering.
Kirkus Reviews
In a word: magnificent.
Los Angeles Times Michael Frank
The masterful interplay between forces large and small, the seen and the intuited, the mysterious and the knowable make Munro's stories expand in the mind pretty much infinitely. [14 Nov 2004, p.R6]
Booklist Brad Hooper
Munro is remarkable for the ease and completeness with which she brings the world of a character into the frame, and her characteristic and greatly effective looping through time--not just connecting present and past but also indicating the future--is haunting. All this in a lovely, precise style. [15 Spet 2004, p.180]
Boston Globe David Thoreen
Munro's stories are often praised for their scope and depth, and rightly so. Each of the stories in Runaway contains enough lived life to fill a typical novel, and reading them is to become immersed in the concerns and worlds of their various characters.
Publishers Weekly
One never knows quite where a Munro story will end, only that it will leave an incandescent trail of psychological insight.
Sydney Morning Herald Nicola Walker
It cannot have escaped anyone's notice that Munro writes about women and that none of Runaway's themes is unusual. What is impossible to know until you read her work is how astonishingly good it is.
The Economist
Ms Munro's prose is translucent, never intruding. Indeed, her whole approach is a humble one, focused on the stories themselves. It is easy to overlook how skilfully they are told.
The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Claire Messud
To any reader broaching Munro's work for the first time, no list of adjectives will suffice to convey what that work is, or its effects: She is one of those few living writers who, in the way of the greats, must simply be read. [25 Sept 2004, p.D6]
The New York Times Book Review Jonathan Franzen
Basically, Runaway is so good that I don't want to talk about it here. Quotation can't do the book justice, and neither can synopsis. The way to do it justice is to read it.
USA Today Maria Fish
May very well be the synthesizing work of one of literature's keenest investigators into the human soul. It will, in any case, reach far beyond its time.
Village Voice Jessica Winter
As lean and finely carved as a middle-distance athlete, as distilled and suggestive as its single-word flashpoint titles.
Chicago Tribune John Freeman
Feels like a compressed collection of novels, so rich and deep and complete are the lives Munro evokes in these pages.
New York Review Of Books A. Alvarez
No one writes more subtly about sexual attraction than Alice Munro -- coolly, discreetly, but without ever lessening its fatal power.
The Independent Lesley McDowell
Startling, wise and beguiling collection.
Atlantic Monthly Lorrie Moore
The thrilling unexpectedness of real life, which Munro rightly insists on, will in her hands keep a reader glued -- even if that reader is torn by the very conflicts (work to do, kid on the high dive) dramatized therein.
The Independent Paul Bailey
Alice Munro has to be judged by the highest standards, the standards she sets herself. Runaway contains two stories that simply don't meet them.
Daily Telegraph Kasia Boddy
These are stories about caprice and the ironies of life, about how difficult it is to predict the consequences of your actions. n some ways, this makes Runaway rather old-fashioned, but Munro is also an innovator.
The Guardian Alan Hollinghurst
Munro has a genius for evoking the particular and peculiar atmosphere of relationships, their unspoken pressures and expectations.
London Review Of Books Mary Hawthorne
With Runaway, Munro has made a radical departure from the rich, consuming stories of her superb last collection.
The Spectator Sebastian Smee
Her vision of human behaviour is open-eyed and unsentimental, her writing dauntingly grown-up.
Daily Telegraph Jane Shilling
The deceptive homeliness of Munro's prose, its beautiful plainness and restraint, lend an extra degree of pathos to the extremities of tragedy that befall her characters.
Washington Post Carolyn See
It ain't what Munro does, to paraphrase the old song. It's the way that she does it.
San Francisco Chronicle David Hellman
The downside to Munro's Olympic dedication to her craft is that nothing much changes in this world. Munro's writing has settled into a kind of regimented intractability.
Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese
Runaway doesn't break new ground -- and it lacks the continuity and power of Munro's 1979 masterpiece, "The Beggar Maid" -- but any new compendium of Munro's wise, delicate, and insightful tales is a treat.
New York Observer Daniel Asa Rose
Worthy but rather hysterically overpraised latest collection. [29 Nov 2004, p.23]
The New York Times Michiko Kakutani
Instead of assuming the organic, musical form of real life, they feel like self-conscious, overworked tales, relying on awkwardly withheld secrets and O'Henryesque twists to create narrative suspense.
 The average user rating for this book is 7.6 (out of 10) based on 12 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
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