Stories
No Advantages
This narrative retells the lives of members of the Laidlaw family who lived in Ettrick Valley, Scotland, in the 18th century. The title comes from the judgment by the Statistical Account of Scotland in 1799 that This parish possesses no advantages. Will O'Phaup was a mythical man, who was a prodigious runner, a bootlegger, and a heavy drinker; he had encounters with fairies and ghosts. Thomas Boston was the local presbyterian preacher at the same time; he wrote on matters of faith, he was obsessed with religious guilt, his ideas were borderline heretical, he had a very hard life. James Hogg and James Laidlaw were cousins; Hogg became a poet and friend of Walter Scott, while Laidlaw was a man of modern ideas but traditional mentality, who was obsessed with going to America, where he eventually took his family when he was already in his old age.
The View from Castle Rock
This story narrates the voyage of James Laidlaw and his family to Canada. The title stems from the event when James took his ten-year-old child Andrew to the top of the Rock of Edinburgh Castle to show him the coast of America (actually Fife). James Laidlaw (Old James) had one daughter, Mary, and 5 sons, Robert, James, Andrew, William, and Walter. Robert and William had moved to the Highlands before the move, while the others followed in the voyage (although James has left earlier). Andrew's family is composed of his pregnant wife Agnes and their infant son (Young) James. Agnes gives birth to a girl during the ocean crossing. Mary is very attached to Young James: she takes care of him and panics when he disappears. Young James dies shortly after their landing. Walter writes down an account of the trip in his journal. He meets a rich girl suffering from tuberculosis; her father suggests he follow them and get a job in his business, but Walter refuses.
Illinois
William Laidlaw also moves to America, specifically to the town of Joliet, Illinois. He is the most forward-looking of Old James' children. He wants to break with his roots and start a completely new life with his wife Mary. But he dies of cholera and his wife and children are taken to Canada by Andrew Laidlaw. The oldest of the children, Jamie, steals his newborn sister Jane and tries to direct the blame on a half-Indian neighbor. This is a plot to keep the family in their home, but it fails. The youngest of William's sons, Thomas, is the author's great-grandfather.
Working for a Living
This story is about Alice Munro's father. As a teenager, he shunned the peasant life of his parents and passed time in the bush hunting and trapping. This led in his adult life to a business of raising fur animals, especially silver foxes and mink. During the war, when Alice was a young girl, the business started to go bad, but was saved by the mother who managed to sell their furs to American tourists. Eventually they had to give up the enterprise and the father found a job in a foundry.
Fathers
The author recalls the days of school and specifically the relationship with two schoolmates, Dahlia Newcombe and Frances Wainwright. The figures of their fathers are compared with Alice Munro's own father. Dahlia's dad was a violent man who regularly beat his children and wife. Mr. Wainwright was a gentle person belonging to the Salvation Army. Alice's father was severe and sometimes used corporal punishment, but never out of anger and without a reason.
Lying Under the Apple Tree
A neighbor of Alice Munro's family, Miriam McAlpin, kept horses. Apparently she loved horses more than people. The young Alice one day entered the property to lie under her blossoming apple trees, to satisfy a literary fancy. She was discovered and accused of going there with a boyfriend.
Later she started her first romantic relation with the stable boy, Russell Craik. One day he takes her to the barn but Miriam enters it. Alice leaves in secret but overhears something and understands that the two have an intimate relationship.
She never sees Russell again.
Hired Girl
It is the chronicle of a summer passed as a servant on an island for a rich family. The persons she meets there are the origins of the girl's literary fantasies.
The Ticket
Just before her first wedding, the narrator has the occasion to reflect upon the marriages of other women in her family. It seems that Aunt Charlie is the only one who married for love. Surprisingly, this same aunt gives the narrator a big amount of money to get out of her marriage in case it doesn't work out.
Home
On a visit home after the end of her marriage, the narrator has to take her father to the hospital. He has remarried after the death of her mother, and the new wife Irlma is an energetic woman who claims that she was always the right woman for him.
What Do You Want to Know For?
After she married for the second time, at the age of sixty, Alice Munro has a health scare: she may have breast cancer. At the same time she and her husband are trying to trace the origin of an unusual crypt they find in an old cemetery. They find out that it was originally built for the body of a small child in the 19th century, and that later other members of the same family were buried there. A curious fact is that a desk with a bible and a lamp were left inside the crypt. Eventually it turns out that the cancer scare was uncertain.
Messenger
In the present, the author travels to Joliet, Illinois, where her ancestor William Laidlaw died. She finds an Unknown Cemetery, but can't find any trace of him. The book closes with the oldest memories of living members of the family. In one of their houses Alice, as a child, could put her ear to a big mother-of-pearl seashell and hear the sound of the sea and her blood.
Hector Hugh Munro, better known by the pen name Saki and also frequently as H. H. Munro, was a British writer whose witty, mischievous and sometimes macabre stories satirize Edwardian society and culture. He is considered by English teachers and scholars as a master of the short story, and often compared to O. Henry and Dorothy Parker. Influenced by Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll and Rudyard Kipling, he himself influenced A. A. Milne, Noël Coward and P. G. Wodehouse.
Alice Adams is a 1921 novel by Booth Tarkington that received the 1922 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel. It was adapted as a film in 1923 by Rowland V. Lee and more famously in 1935 by George Stevens. The narrative centers on the character of a young woman who aspires to climb the social ladder and win the affections of a wealthy young man named Arthur Russell. The story is set in a lower-middle-class household in an unnamed town in the Midwest shortly after World War I.
James Hogg was a Scottish poet, novelist and essayist who wrote in both Scots and English. As a young man he worked as a shepherd and farmhand, and was largely self-educated through reading. He was a friend of many of the great writers of his day, including Sir Walter Scott, of whom he later wrote an unauthorized biography. He became widely known as the "Ettrick Shepherd", a nickname under which some of his works were published, and the character name he was given in the widely read series Noctes Ambrosianae, published in Blackwood's Magazine. He is best known today for his novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. His other works include the long poem The Queen's Wake (1813), his collection of songs Jacobite Relics (1819), and his two novels The Three Perils of Man (1822), and The Three Perils of Woman (1823).
Alice Ann Munro is a Canadian short story writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Munro's work has been described as having revolutionized the architecture of short stories, especially in its tendency to move forward and backward in time. Her stories have been said to "embed more than announce, reveal more than parade."
William Laidlaw (1780–1845) was a Scottish poet. The son of a border farmer, he became steward and amanuensis to Walter Scott, and was the author of a well-known ballad, Lucy's Flittin.
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is a book of short stories by Alice Munro, published by McClelland and Stewart in 2001.
The Bride of Lammermoor is a historical novel by Sir Walter Scott, published in 1819. The novel is set in the Lammermuir Hills of south-east Scotland, and tells of a tragic love affair between young Lucy Ashton and her family's enemy Edgar Ravenswood. Scott indicated the plot was based on an actual incident. The Bride of Lammermoor and A Legend of Montrose were published together anonymously as the third of Scott's Tales of My Landlord series. The story is the basis for Donizetti's 1835 opera Lucia di Lammermoor.
A Complicated Kindness (2004) is the third novel by Canadian author Miriam Toews. The novel won a number of awards including the Governor General's Award for English Fiction, the CBA Libris Fiction Award, and CBC's Canada Reads.
"The King and the Beggar-maid" is a 16th-century broadside ballad that tells the story of an African king, Cophetua, and his love for the beggar Penelophon. The story has been widely referenced and King Cophetua has become a byword for "a man who falls in love with a woman instantly and proposes marriage immediately".
Peveril of the Peak (1823) is the longest novel by Sir Walter Scott. Along with Ivanhoe, Woodstock and Kenilworth, this is one of Scott's English novels, with the main action taking place around 1678.
The Last of the Mohicans is a 1936 American adventure western film based on the 1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper. It was directed by George B. Seitz and stars Randolph Scott, Binnie Barnes and Henry Wilcoxon.
Creepshow 3 is a 2006 American horror film, and a sequel to Stephen King and George A. Romero's horror anthology classics Creepshow (1982) and Creepshow 2 (1987). It was directed and produced by Ana Clavell and James Dudelson. The film stars Roy Ambrason, Kris Allen, Magi Avila, A. J. Bowen, Elwood Carlisle, Ed Dyer and Bunny Gibson.
"Boys and Girls" is a short story by Alice Munro, the Canadian winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013 which deals with the making of gender roles.
The Three Perils of Man; or, War, Women, and Witchcraft. A Border Romance (1822) is a novel by James Hogg.
The Spy was a weekly periodical directed at the Edinburgh market, edited by James Hogg, which appeared from 1 September 1810 to 24 August 1811.
Tales of the Wars of Montrose is a set of six fictional narratives by James Hogg published in 1835. Each of them centres on the fortunes of an individual during the civil conflict of the 1640s in Scotland.
The Shepherd's Calendar (1829) is a collection of 21 articles by James Hogg, most of which had appeared in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine since 1819. They are set in, or deal with aspects of, the Scottish Borders, in particular Hogg's native Ettrick Forest.
The Brownie of Bodsbeck (1818) is the first (short) novel by James Hogg. Set in the Scottish Borders in 1685 it presents a sympathetic picture of the persecuted Covenanters and a harsh view of the Royalists led by Clavers (Claverhouse). It draws extensively on local superstitions.
