I read a number of the short stories - they deal with everyday life's details, small things that can change one's life dramatically. This may be illness, the perception of being strange, a woman in isolation, and these stories carefully explore but also still leave the reader to guess at the end what the outcome of the story may be. I have to admit that I found most of them utterly depressing. ( )

I have previously watched the movie "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage" and liked it well enough and was intrigued when I found out that it was a short story written by Alice Munro. When the opportunity arose for me to select her collection of short stories from 1995 to 2014 I jumped at the chance.

Unfortunately I did not care for this collection as a whole. I am very surprised by how many people enthused about Alice Munro's short stories since besides two of the stories contained within I did not like at all.

Everything seemed endlessly wordy and the main theme for all of these stories seemed to be a woman under some man's thumb who either left her husband for another man or just had affairs, etc. There seemed to be a general feeling of dissatisfaction in all of these women lives. Additionally, this was a massive read at 616 pages and it really dragged throughout every story. It didn't help that perspectives changed sometimes throughout just one story so if you started off with one character you didn't end up finishing that story with that character's perception. Overall, I just didn't find any uplifting with any of these stories and ended up with just a feeling of general dissatisfaction when I finally was done with these stories.

For example, the first story, "The Love of a Good Woman" starts off discussing a doctor who committed suicide that transitions into three boys who find the body and their lives at home. Then it suddenly jumps to a woman who is nursing a dying woman and her connection to the doctor. There were just a lot of lost threads in that story and I was left scratching my head. I found out later that this story and two others that were included were initially published in 1998 in another collection of short stories titled "The Love of a Good Woman".

I did like the story "Jakarta" and "The Children Stay". I was disappointed that I really didn't like the short story version of "Hateship, Friendhsip, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage'. The other stories I found to be either just okay or just outright did not care for. Due to that I gave this entire collection 2 stars.

Please note that I received this book for free via the Amazon Vine Program. ( )

I was expecting this to be a collection of stories, but the edition I got only contained one fairly average story - possibly not representative of the full collection. ( )

Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014 by Alice Munro is a very highly recommended collection of 24 short stories with an introduction by Jane Smiley.

All these short stories have been previously published and are now brought together for this collection. The title stories, which are all novella length, from all six of her most recent collections have been included. As one of the great short story writers of our time, Monro has a clear insight into her characters and setting. She can capture a slice of an ordinary person's life and present it so it is reflecting the universal human condition. This is a great way to follow ongoing themes in her work and see them develop over time.

Family Furnishings is a wonderful edition to have, especially as a companion to her Selected Stories, which covers work from 1968-1994. Monro is a Nobel Prize winner and one of the most accomplished short story writers of our time. This would be an excellent way to acquaint yourself with Monro's writing, perhaps savoring it slowly, one story at a time, especially since the collection is 640 pages. Let's face it: she is an exceptional writer and this is an tremendous addition to any collection of short stories.

Contents:
The Love of a Good Woman; Jakarta; The Children Stay; My Mother’s Dream; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage; Family Furnishings; Post and Beam; The Bear Came Over the Mountain; The View from Castle Rock; Working for a Living; Hired Girl; Home; Runaway; Soon; Passion; Dimensions; Wood; Child’s Play; Too Much Happiness; To Reach Japan; Amundsen; Train; The Eye; Dear Life.

Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of Knopf Doubleday for review purposes.
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From the recipient of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature -- perhaps our most beloved author -- a new selection of her peerless short fiction, gathered from the collections of the last two decades, a companion volume to Selected Stories (1968-1994).

By all accounts, no Nobel Prize in recent years has garnered the enthusiastic reception that Alice Munro's has, and in its wake, her reputation and readership has skyrocketed worldwide. Now, Family Furnishings will bring us twenty-five of her most accomplished, most powerfully affecting stories, most of them set in the territory she has so brilliantly made her own: the small towns and flatlands of southwestern Ontario. Subtly honed with the author's hallmark precision, grace, and compassion, these stories illuminate the ordinary but quite extraordinary particularity in the lives of men, women, and children as they discover sex, fall in love, part, quarrel, head out into the unknown, suffer defeat, and find a way to be in the world.As the Nobel Prize presentation speech reads in part: "Reading one of Alice Munro's texts is like watching a cat walk across a laid dinner table. A brief short story can often cover decades, summarizing a life, as she moves deftly between different periods. No wonder Alice Munro is often able to say more in thirty pages than an ordinary novelist is capable of in three hundred. She is a virtuoso of the elliptical and...the master of the contemporary short story."