I liked some of Munro's style, especially the way she would just casually drop critical information in the middle of a sentence or paragraph with no big flashing lights telling you it was coming, making the reader have to pay attention to get the meat of the stories. That said, many of her endings left me feeling unfulfilled, as if there was more to be told to the stories but they'd been stopped too abruptly. So, decent writing, not always thrilled with the endings.

I don't generally like short stories because once I get into the characters and plot I like to spend more time with them and sometimes short stories seem like plots that just didn't work out and couldn't be written longer. But these stories were all complete and they had unexpected elements that kept the writing fresh. I liked the first story, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, which provides the title of the collection, the best. It is very O'Henry like and a delight. I liked Family Furnishings because it seemed very personal and talked about the pitfalls of using people you know in your fiction. I liked Queenie because the main character was interesting.

There were a lot of stories about women feeling trapped in a marriage and yearning for someone else, transgressive lust. Munro was divorced so I imagine she knew something about that. There were stories about sudden unexpected deaths -- suicide or death of a child -- and one of Munro's daughter died shortly after birth. And there were, of course, stories about college professors or attending college.

So a nice collection with many unexpected elements and a few highlights.

This is the second book of short stories of Alice Munro's that I've read, and as I felt after the last one, she has a gift for writing about complexities of inter-personal relationships, and memory/the passage of time. I really liked this collection -- the theme of most stories was marriage and/or a woman's journey towards something more independent. My one issue was that I thought that almost all of the stories featured a long-term marriage that became distant or stale, and it would have been interesting to feature one that went in the opposite direction. And I started to anticipate the direction the story was going to go in.

stories that are short and feature covetous relationships and other life slices

I started rereading this book after looking for Munro's short story that the film "Away from Her" was based on. Great movie, great story. A lot like "In the Bedroom" in that a great director took a short story and made it into a great work of its own.