Alice the Great and her new collection of stories, Dear Life

Any new collection of stories by Alice (the Great) Munro is an occasion, and I'm really please that daught gave me a copy of Dear Life for xmas, which I know am reading - though of course I've read about half the stories already in various issues of the NYer. Re-read one last night, Amundsen (name of remote Canadian town where story takes place ca 1945), and is it just me or are there passages or even sections in this book-published version that did not appear in the magazine version (it seems the trainride back to Toronto included some extra material, for ex). Also read for the first time the initial story, To Reach Japan. The two make an interesting set: Japan is relatively short for Munro, is not one of her greatest stories, but touches on a number of her perennial themes: a woman with a literary bent is in a dull marriage, in Vancouver in I think about 1960, and struggles for her independence and her freedom to write. Two notable things about this story: the story builds to a point of dramatic crisis, unusual for Munro, in which the woman temporarily loses her 5-year-old daughter on a train, finds her perilously sitting between cars, and feels guilt and remorse - in particular because she left the sleeping daughter to engage in quick sex with just-met fellow passenger. The near tragedy and the burden of guilt is a little high-temperature for Munro. Second unusual element is that, though we are meant on some level to sympathize with the woman, who is enchained to some degree by family and marital obligations (in this sense, Munro is the Canadian daughter of Tillie Olsen), the woman is truly a shit to her husband - engaging in affairs and quick flings, with no attempt to hide this from their young child - while he seems dull and provincial but in no ways bad or evil - even quite tolerant of her aspirations and yearnings for freedom. Story puts us into a moral quagmire. Not so Amundsen, in which the guy is truly a complete shit (the stories make nice bookends or mirror images with with to begin the collection), seducing the young narrator schoolteacher, bullying and bossing her at every turn, totally self-centered - shows how vulnerable and naive she is that she agrees to marry him, and then he abandons her - an awful guy, and there are slight hints that he may have a secret sexual life or perhaps no sense of his hidden homoerotic desires. In Munro fashion, the two cross paths many years later in Toronto - she gives us the barest glimpse of the narrator's present-day life, married and maybe not totally happy in that - and it's a bit of a disappointment that the two do not exchange some information (which I think they would do) instead of just passing on the street and saying hello - but that's Munro, her stories are so successful because of her unconventional structure and the odd way she focuses carefully on some narrative elements and breezes through others.