Family Furnishings

Too Much Happiness
 
Many persons who have not studied mathematics confuse it with arithmetic and consider it a dry and arid science. Actually, however, this science requires great fantasy.
Sophia Kovalevsky
 
On the first day of January, in the year 1891, a small woman and a large man are walking in the Old Cemetery, in Genoa. Both of them are around forty years old. The woman has a childishly large head, with a thicket of dark curls, and her expression is eager, faintly pleading. Her face has begun to look worn. The man is immense. He weighs 285 pounds, distributed over a large frame, and being Russian, he is often referred to as a bear, also as a Cossack. At present he is crouching over tombstones and writing in his notebook, collecting inscriptions and puzzling over abbreviations not immediately clear to him, though he speaks Russian, French, English, Italian, and has an under- standing of classical and medieval Latin. His knowledge is as expansive as his physique, and though his speciality is governmental law, he is capable of lecturing on the growth of contemporary political institutions in America, the peculiarities of society in Russia and the West, and the laws and practices of ancient empires. But he is not a pedant. He is witty and popular, at ease on various levels, and able to live a most comfortable life, due to his properties near Kharkov. He has, however, been forbidden to hold an academic post in Russia, because of being a Liberal.
 
His name suits him. Maksim. Maksim Maksimovich Kovalevsky.
 
The woman with him is also a Kovalevsky. She was married to a distant cousin of his, but is now a widow.
 
She speaks to him teasingly.
 
You know that one of us will die, she says. One of us will die this year.
 
Only half listening, he asks her, Why is that?
 
Because we have gone walking in a graveyard on the first day of the New
Year.
 
Indeed.
 
There are

Alice Munro is the author of thirteen collections of stories—including Dear Life, Runaway, and Too Much Happiness—as well as a novel, Lives of Girls and Women. Among the many awards and prizes she received are three Governor General’s Literary Awards and two Giller Prizes in Canada; the Rea Award; the Lannan Literary Award; the National Book Critics Circle Award; and the International Booker Prize. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Alice Munro died in 2024.

What a stunning, subtle and sympathetic explorer of the heart Munro is. The Washington Post

Generations to come will relish and study Family Furnishings. . . . A superb introduction for those new to her work, and a reminder to longtime fans that Munro is a writer to be cherished. NPR

Brilliant. . . . In the simplest of words, and with the greatest of power, she makes us see and hear an unremarkable scene we will never forget. The New York Review of Books
 
Turn to just about any page and you ll discover a brilliant insight into human behavior. . . . Family Furnishings reminds us that Munro is our greatest contemporary short story writer. USA Today

[An] extraordinary collection. . . . Munro seems to have gotten hold of our own darkest feelings about the people in our lives and transformed them, gloriously, into art. San Francisco Chronicle

The preeminent short-fiction writer of her time. . . . Astonishing. . . . Stunning. . . . Remind[s] us that fiction, at its most profound and moving, is about human endurance, which makes it very much a reflection of reality. Los Angeles Times
 
Munro s literary genius for the short-story form has been widely deemed incomparable. The Canadian writer captures those small moments that reverberate through ordinary lives in meticulous prose. Her economy in words fashions a language that pierces the heart. New York Daily News
 
These are human stories, and great ones. . . . Nobody can tell a tale, spin a character, break a heart, the way Alice Munro can. Minneapolis Star Tribune

Munro may have arrived at the end of her career, but her stories keep changing, as works of art tend to do. . . . Because Munro s people often act unpredictably they wind up doing things they hadn t known they were going to do and startle themselves the stories, even on repeated readings, retain their original suspense, their sense that anything can