Upcoming Books:
April 17
Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You by Alice Munro
The Moons of Jupiter by Alice Munro
May 15
The Lowlands by Jhumpa Lahiri 

Award winning author and Book Club Extraordinaire member,  Carol Ferring Shepley introduces her new book Lori's Lessons: What Parkinson Teaches About Life and Love. 
Alice Munro has been awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, the Swedish Academy announced Thursday morning. The academy often explains its decision — what it calls the "prize motivation" — with lush precision; recent winners have been praised for their "hallucinatory realism," "condensed, translucent images" and "sensual ecstasy." But for Munro, the committee came straight to the point: They called her simply "master of the contemporary short story."" writes CAMILA DOMONOSKE and ANNALISA QUINN in the Oct. 10, 2013,   NPR books article. 

Read BExtraordinaire Blog for more reviews on our next book club selection. 

Author Bio:

Canadian writer, Alice Munro was born in July 10, 1931 in Wingham Ontario.  She attended the University of Western Ontario and later returned as writer in residence.  She has received numerous awards including: The 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, the W.H. Smith Prize, the National Book Circle Critics Award, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, 2009 Man Book International Prize for her lifetime body of work, as well as many others. She has written 15 short story collections and one novel, The Lives of Girls and Women.
is reading the short stories "How I Met My Husband" and "The Moons of Jupiter"  written by Alice Munro for April 17, 2014.

Book Club Extraordinaire is reading Alice Munro for April 17. We are reading two short stories: “How I Met My Husband” from Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You and “The Moons of Jupiter” from the book of the same title.

Alice Munro, winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature is acclaimed as one of the finest contemporary short-story writers. She is known for her elegant and quiet, and realistic prose.  She insightfully writes about the daily lives of girls and women on themes of love, fate and freedom. 

On the surface, “How I Met My Husband” appears to be a straightforward plot driven story about a fifteen-year old girl, Edie. In this story, she is looking back on how she met her husband. At fifteen, she goes to work for Dr. and Mrs. Pebbles as a “hired girl” after flunking out of high school.  The Pebbles had recently moved five miles outside of town to an old farm when pilot Chris Watters lands in town and begins giving $1 rides nearby.  Life gets interesting as things begin to heat up after Watters arrives at the house catching Edie home alone playing dress-up in one of Mrs. Pebble’s gowns. This short story is anything but straightforward, full of surprises, secrets, and scandals.


Author Quotes: “Reading was my life really until I was thirty. I was living in books. The writers of the American South were the first writers who really moved me because they showed me that you could write about small towns, rural people, and that kind of life I knew very well. But the thing about the Southern writers that interested me, without my being really aware of it, was that all the Southern writers whom I really loved were women. I didn’t really like Faulkner that much. I loved Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Ann Porter, Carson McCullers. There was a feeling that women could write about the freakish, the marginal."

― Alice Munro from "Alice Munro, The Art of Fiction No. 137" Interviewed by Jeanne McCulloch, Mona Simpson for the Paris Review.