… Runaway is a book of extraordinary stories about love and its infinite betrayals and surprises, from the title story about a young woman who, though she thinks she wants to, is incapable of leaving her husband, to three stories about a woman named Juliet and the emotions that complicate the luster of her intimate relationships …
(from Goodreads / back cover)
Alice Munro won the 2013 Nobel Prize in literature and is one of the key writers who has contributed to the development of the short story cycle as a form, in my humble opinion. Expect more entries on her work soon!
More about this collection
“The Uses and Limits of the Short Story” – an interesting academic article about the development of Alice Munro’s writing of short stories, with a particular view to the short story cycle.
19 short stories of Alice Munro you can read for free online
Quote
“She could not explain or quite understand that it wasn’t altogether jealousy she felt, it was rage. And not because she couldn’t shop like that or dress like that. It was because that was what girls were supposed to be like. That was what men – people, everybody – thought they should be like. Beautiful, treasured, spoiled, selfish, pea-brained. That was what a girl should be, to be fallen in love with. Then she would become a mother and she’d be all mushily devoted to her babies. Not selfish anymore, but just as pea-brained. Forever.”
– Alice Munro, Runaway
Connected story
“Someone Else’s Dream” – a story in the Shade of the Morning Sun cycle, taking place in the year 2027
