No Love Lost

Beverly Rasporich is a professor in the Faculty of Communication and
Culture at the University of Calgary. She is the author of Dance of the
Sexes: Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro and Magic Off Main:
The Art of Esther Warkov.

Alice Munro needs no introduction as one of Canada’s most celebrated
writers of fiction; hers is an international reputation as a mistress of
the short-story genre. Although this is not the first anthology of
Munro’s writing, it is the first that has been compiled with a theme
in mind. For Munro readers it will come as no surprise that the theme is
love.

The 10 stories in No Love Lost are “Bardon Bus,” “Carried
Away,” “Mischief,” “The Love of a Good Woman,” “Simon’s
Luck,” “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,”
“The Bear Came over the Mountain,” “The Albanian Virgin,”
“Menesteung,” and “The Children Stay.” In addition to these
stories, there is a lovely afterword by the accomplished writer Jane
Urquhart, who comments, “[I]t is the mystery of love and the
development of our fully human, multi-faceted natures while under its
influence (or recovering from its assaults) that form the core of this
selection. For what is love if not the last splendid, indefinable
mystery?”

With the possible exception of “Mischief” and “Simon’s Luck,”
readers will experience Munro in this collection as a mature writer with
a veteran understanding of fiction-making. There will be the discovery,
too, whether reading Munro for the first or fourth time, of the many
nuances and layers of her art. Her work also promises moments of
epiphany—of amazing understanding of the transformational, mundane,
trivial, magical, obscene, powerful, practical complexities of love.