TOO MUCH HAPPINESS

The latest short story collection from the great Canadian author.

"How does Alice Munro do it? What she achieves seems like magic."
Sara Mesa

"Alice Munro has a prodigious mind. She is precise, natural, and tells the interiority and flow of entire lives in a few pages like no one else."
Rodrigo Muñoz Avia

A young mother receives unexpected solace for the death of her three children; another woman reacts unusually to the humiliation inflicted upon her by a man; other stories describe the cruelty of children and the pockets of loneliness created in the everyday life of a couple. As a grand finale, in the last story, we accompany Sofi a Kovalevski, a Russian mathematician who truly lived in the mid-19th century, on her long pilgrimage across Europe in search of a university that would admit women as professors, and we experience with her her love story with a man who did his best to disappoint her.

Seemingly trivial anecdotes are transformed into pure emotion in Munro's hands, and her style displays these emotions effortlessly, thanks to an exceptional talent that draws the reader into the stories almost without preamble.

"She hated the word escapism applied to fiction. It was more real life that deserved to be labeled escapism..." These words, spoken by one of her characters, could refer to all of Munro's prose, which explores deep wounds with intelligence and irony, with that fierce and austere depth that surprises the reader, as if something about ourselves that we didn't know, that perhaps we didn't want to know, had suddenly slipped into the pages of a book.

Reviews:
"I want my stories to be about life, so that the reader doesn't say: 'Come on, this isn't real,' but finds a reward in them, not because they have a happy ending or anything like that, but because everything the story tells moves them so much that they feel like a different person after reading it."
Alice Munro, Nobel Prize in Literature

"Her work seemed revolutionary to me when I discovered it, and it still does."
Jhumpa Lahiri, The New Yorker

"'Dissection' is the word that best describes Munro's work. What else should we call the combination of obsessive scrutiny, archaeological exhumation, precise and detailed recollection, and obsession with the sordid, miserable, and vengeful underside of human nature, the confession of erotic secrets, the nostalgia for lost sadness, and the rejoicing in the fullness and variety of life?"
Margaret Atwood, The New Yorker

"Alice Munro can move her characters through time like no other writer. You don't realize time is passing, only that it has passed."
Julian Barnes, The New Yorker

"A wonderful writer. [...] and how encouraging it is for those of us who love stories that they honor [with the Nobel Prize] this master of the realistic, 'Chekhovian' short story."
Joyce Carol Oates, The New Yorker

"Who can write a book called Too Much Happiness. Probably only this woman who has made her gaze a continuous story about the world. Words like intimacy, detail, or lightness make up the cartography of her writing. An apparent journey of touch and surface, between the everyday and the discreet, that reveals folds and layers. [...] Literary material that is dissection and the reverse of life."
Guillermo Ballbona, El Diario Montañés