Moons of Jupiter: Stories [Hardcover]

Alice Munro (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1982 | ISBN-10: 0771597258 | ISBN-13: 978-0771597251 | Edition: First Edition

In these piercingly lovely and endlessly surprising stories by one of the most acclaimed current practitioners of the art of fiction, many things happen: there are betrayals and reconciliations, love affairs consummated and mourned. But the true events in The Moons Of Jupiter are the ways in which the characters are transformed over time, coming to view their past selves with an anger, regret, and infinite compassion that communicate themselves to us with electrifying force.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Themes of heartbreak and the sadness of women aging dominate this collection: in ``The Stone in the Field,'' maiden aunts inhabit a farmhouse, dreading human contact; in ``The Turkey Season,'' a girl paid to gut turkeys observes the sexual carryings-on of adults. According to PW , ``The writer's questioning memory gives us sharp flashes of reality that are so vividly recalled they permit us to live another life for a moment.''

Copyright 1991 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Review

"Munro is in a class of her own....No other writer working today is able to invest the humble story with more power, grace or breadth....Munro has been compared to Chekhov...She has the haunting lyricism and the indulgent wisdom to qualify."--Los Angeles Times Book Review

"How does one know when one is in the grip of art, a major talent? One feels it in the assurance, the sensibility behind every line of a work; one knows its presence as much from what is withheld as from what is given or explained. It is art that speaks from the pages of Alice Munro's stories." -- Wall Street Journal


From the Trade Paperback edition. --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 233 pages
• Publisher: Gage Distribution Co; First Edition edition (October 1982)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0771597258
• ISBN-13: 978-0771597251
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,230,715 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published eleven previous books.During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including the W.H. Smith Prize, the National Book Circle Critics Award, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, the Lannan Literary Award, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and the Rea Award for the Short Story. In Canada, she has won the Governor General's Award, the Giller Prize, the Trillium Book Award, and the Libris Award.Alice Munro and her husband divide their time between Clinton, Ontario, and Comox, British Columbia.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

51 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I nominate Munro for the Nobel Prize, October 19, 2006

By 

Giordano Bruno - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

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This review is from: The Moons of Jupiter (Paperback)

I won't tell you what to look for or how to feel when you read Alice Munro. If you've never encountered her before, The Moons of Jupiter is the best place to start, early Munro at the height of her evocative powers. Don't turn to the Selected Stories first. Each of Munro's books is a suite of stories, interlocking in themes and often in characters, on the model of a sonata, a suite of musical movements. The experience of reading the whole suite is more powerful than the sum of the separate stories. Perhaps the story-suite is the successor to the floundering form of the modern novel.
By the way, Munro is admittedly a woman writng about women for women to read, but I'm an outdoors guy, a baseball fan, a weight-lifter, and at least until my son was born something of a rascal, despite all of which I rank Alice Munro very high among my favorite fiction writers.

26 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars provides great perspectives to the perplexities of everyday, March 12, 1999

By 

Christina ([e-mail]) (Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews

In The Moons of Jupiter, Munro clearly reveals the universal perplexities of our everyday lives. The characters have a rich realness to them and must be commended for their candid honesty. The strength of this book lies in Munro's ability to create a genuine perspective in which the reader has no choice than to become emotionally connected to the characters. I enjoyed these stories because there are many "grey areas" in which the reader must rely on his own experiences to draw conclusions. There are no definative endings to these stories. They are written in such a way that there is often a fine line between hope and despondence; only the reader's morals and values can recognize one from the other.

3.0 out of 5 stars Humble, yet fun, August 17, 2011

By 

Maestro - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Moons of Jupiter (Paperback)

I am not an expert, when it comes to literature, but my opinion about the book is as follows. The book offers some great stories with describtions so detailed that one can believe the stories are all true. SOme of them are very moving, some of them very shallow, but they are all great stories. The reason I gave the book 3 stars out of 5 is, that the stories are not connected. The only thing they have in common is that they happen in the same cities. After reading the book, the pieces of the book are still left shattered. I recommend reading the book chapter by chapter.