Too Much Happiness » (Reprint)

Alice Munro is hardly the typical writer of love stories. Throughout her more than fifty-year career, she has never pandered to an audience used to happy endings and perfect relationships. Instead, she writes with a maturity and honesty that reveals the true nature of love in all its heartbreaking complexity.

Ten superb new stories by one of our most beloved and admired writers—the winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize.

With clarity and ease, Alice Munro once again renders complex, difficult events and emotions into stories about the unpredictable ways in which men and women accommodate and often transcend what happens in their lives.
 
In the first story a young wife and mother, suffering from the unbearable pain of losing her three children, gains solace from a most surprising source. In another, a young woman, in the aftermath of an unusual and humiliating seduction, reacts in a clever if less-than-admirable fashion. Other tales uncover the “deep-holes” in a marriage, the unsuspected cruelty of children, and, in the long title story, the yearnings of a nineteenth-century female mathematician.

The Barnes & Noble Review

The novelist Benjamin Cheever once brilliantly summed up New Yorker fiction as the kind of story where nothing much happens, but you feel a little sad about it anyway. Alice Munro's wonderful short stories (12 volumes of them so far), many of them originally published in The New Yorker, can mostly be said to fall into this category. But in old age she seems to be moving in a new direction, for things do happen in the ten tales that make up Too Much Happiness: lots of things, sometimes violent things. The tone is set in the very first story, "Dimensions," a disturbing look into the mind of a young woman to whom unspeakable damage has been done.

Dimensions Fiction Wenlock Edge Deep-Holes Free Radicals Face Some Women Child’s Play Wood Too Much Happiness

Acknowledgments