Canadian author Alice Munro is perhaps best-known for her short stories. Through her long and illustrious career, which came to an end in May of 2024 when she died at the age of 92, Munro wrote many short stories about the human condition. Several of her most famous short stories about the human condition are collected in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, which was published in 2001. There are nine short stories in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. Each story talks about a theme mentioned in the collection's title. For instance, in the collection's second story, entitled "Floating Bridge," Jinny and Neal develop a hateship with each other and butt heads with each other because of differences.
When it was published, the collection received very positive reviews and earned a number of awards from prestigious organizations across the world. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times gave the collection a positive review, saying that "These tales have the intimacy of a family photo album and the organic feel of real life, and they give us portraits created not through willful artifice, but through imaginative sympathy and virtuosic craft."
