Books by Alice Munro
Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You: 13 Stories
by Alice Munro
A “masterful” (Houston Post) collection of stories from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro
“A spellbinding tour through a world of love, menace, and surprise . . . [Munro] is a writer of enormous gifts and perception.”—Los Angeles Times
The sisters, mothers and daughters, aunts, grandmothers, and friends in these thirteen stories, “a rich exploration of womanhood” (Ms.), shimmer with hope and love, anger and reconciliation, as they content with their histories and their present, and what they can see of the future.
In her remarkable second collection, Alice Munro demonstrates the precise observation, straightforward prose style, and masterful technique hailed by John Updike, who wrote in the New York Times Book Review that “one must go back to Tolstoy and Chekhov . . . for comparable largeness.”
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Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories
by Alice Munro
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro come nine short stories with “the intimacy of a family photo album and the organic feel of real life” (The New York Times)
“In Munro’s hands, as in Chekhov’s, a short story is more than big enough to hold the world—and to astonish us, again and again.”—Chicago Tribune
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD • A TIME BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
In the nine breathtaking stories that make up this collection, Alice Munro creates narratives that loop and swerve like memory, conjuring up characters as thorny and contradictory as people we know ourselves.
The fate of a strong-minded housekeeper with a “frizz of reddish hair,” just entering the dangerous country of old-maidhood, is unintentionally (and deliciously) reversed by a teenaged girl’s practical joke. A college student visiting her aunt for the first time and recognizing the family furniture stumbles on a long-hidden secret and its meaning in her own life. An inveterate philanderer finds the tables turned when he puts his wife into an old-age home. A young cancer patient stunned by good news discovers a perfect bridge to her suddenly regained future. A woman recollecting an afternoon’s wild lovemaking with a stranger realizes how the memory of that encounter has both changed for her and sustained her through a lifetime.
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is Munro at her best—tirelessly observant, serenely free of illusion, deeply and gloriously humane.
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Runaway
by Wendelin Van Draanen, Alice Munro, Peter May
In Alice Munro’s superb new collection, we find stories about women of all ages and circumstances, their lives made palpable by the subtlety and empathy of this incomparable writer.
The runaway of the title story is a young woman who, though she thinks she wants to, is incapable of leaving her husband. In “Passion,” a country girl emerging into the larger world via a job in a resort hotel discovers in a single moment of stunning insight the limits and lies of that mysterious emotion. Three stories are about a woman named Juliet–in the first, she escapes from teaching at a girls’ school into a wild and irresistible love match; in the second she returns with her child to the home of her parents, whose life and marriage she finally begins to examine; and in the last, her child, caught, she mistakenly thinks, in the grip of a religious cult, vanishes into an unexplained and profound silence. In the final story, “Powers,” a young woman with the ability to read the future sets off a chain of events that involves her husband-to-be and a friend in a lifelong pursuit of what such a gift really means, and who really has it.
Throughout this compelling collection, Alice Munro’s understanding of the people about whom she writes makes them as vivid as our own neighbors. Here are the infinite betrayals and surprises of love–between men and women, between friends, between parents and children–that are the stuff of all our lives. It is Alice Munro’s special gift to make these stories as vivid and real as our own.
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Runaway
by Wendelin Van Draanen, Alice Munro, Peter May
"It's a cold, hard, cruel fact that my mother loved heroin more than she loved me."
Holly is in her fifth foster home in two years and she's had enough. She's run away before and always been caught quickly. But she's older and wiser now--she's twelve--and this time she gets away clean.
Through tough and tender and angry and funny journal entries, Holly spills out her story. We travel with her across the country--hopping trains, scamming food, sleeping in parks or homeless encampments. And we also travel with her across the gaping holes in her heart--as she finally comes to terms with her mother's addiction and death.
Runaway is a remarkably uplifting portrait of a girl still young and stubborn and naive enough to hold out hope for finding a better place in the world, and within herself, to be.
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Runaway
by Wendelin Van Draanen, Alice Munro, Peter May
"It's a cold, hard, cruel fact that my mother loved heroin more than she loved me."
Holly is in her fifth foster home in two years and she's had enough. She's run away before and always been caught quickly. But she's older and wiser now--she's twelve--and this time she gets away clean.
Through tough and tender and angry and funny journal entries, Holly spills out her story. We travel with her across the country--hopping trains, scamming food, sleeping in parks or homeless encampments. And we also travel with her across the gaping holes in her heart--as she finally comes to terms with her mother's addiction and death.
Runaway is a remarkably uplifting portrait of a girl still young and stubborn and naive enough to hold out hope for finding a better place in the world, and within herself, to be.
From the Hardcover edition.
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Runaway
by Wendelin Van Draanen, Alice Munro, Peter May
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Eight “sparkling [and] beautifully drawn” (Entertainment Weekly) stories about love and its infinite betrayals and surprises, from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro
“Each of the stories in Runaway contains enough lived life to fill a typical novel.”—The Boston Globe
WINNER OF THE GILLER PRIZE • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Atlantic Monthly, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, San Jose Mercury News, Kansas City Star
The runaway of the title story is a young woman who, though she thinks she wants to, is incapable of leaving her husband. In “Passion,” a country girl emerging into the larger world via a job in a resort hotel discovers a single moment of stunning insight and the limits and lies of that mysterious emotion. Three stories, the inspiration for the award–winning movie Julieta, are about a woman named Juliet—in the first, she escapes from teaching at a girls’ school into a wild and irresistible love match; in the second she returns with her child to the home of her parents, whose life and marriage she finally begins to examine; and in the last, her child, caught, she mistakenly thinks, in the grip of a religious cult, vanishes into an unexplained and profound silence. In the final story, “Powers,” a young woman with the ability to read the future sets off a chain of events that involves her husband-to-be and a friend in a lifelong pursuit of what such a gift really means, and who really has it.
In Munro’s hands, the people she writes about—women of all ages and circumstances, and their friends, lovers, parents, and children—become as vivid as our own neighbors. It is her miraculous gift to make these stories as real and unforgettable as our own.
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Runaway
by Wendelin Van Draanen, Alice Munro, Peter May
"MAY IS GOING FROM STRENGTH TO STRENGTH... A WONDERFUL EXHIBITION OF JUST HOW GOOD MAY CAN BE." --The Daily Mail
"Five of us had run away that fateful night just over a month before. Only three of us would be going home. And nothing, nothing would ever be the same again."
Glasgow, 1965. Headstrong teenager Jack Mackay has just one destination on his mind--London--and successfully convinces his four friends, and fellow bandmates, to join him in abandoning their homes to pursue a goal of musical stardom.
Glasgow, 2015. Jack Mackay, heavy-hearted sixty-seven-year-old is still haunted by what might have been. His recollections of the terrible events that befell him and his friends some fifty years earlier, and how he did not act when it mattered most is a memory he has tried to escape his entire adult life.
London, 2015. A man lies dead in a one-room flat. His killer looks on, remorseless.
What started with five teenagers following a dream five decades before has been transformed over the intervening decades into a waking nightmare that might just consume them all.
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Runaway
by Wendelin Van Draanen, Alice Munro, Peter May
This diary of a runaway girl and her search for a home celebrates hope, resilience, and happy endings as only Wendelin Van Draanen, the author of Flipped and other acclaimed novels, can.
Holly has run away before, but this time she actually gets away—and what at first felt like an escape soon becomes a daily struggle for survival. She is smart and resourceful, and she manages to make it across the country on her own. But how long can this go on? It’s getting harder to avoid the truth—Holly is now homeless.
Runaway is a remarkably uplifting portrait of a girl still young and stubborn and naive enough to believe there’s a better place for her in the world.
“Will grab readers from the first entry.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Holly’s lively self lingers in the way the best characters do. Runaway is certainly one of the best young adult books of the year.” —The Sacramento Bee
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Runaway
by Wendelin Van Draanen, Alice Munro, Peter May
"MAY IS GOING FROM STRENGTH TO STRENGTH... A WONDERFUL EXHIBITION OF JUST HOW GOOD MAY CAN BE." --The Daily Mail
"Five of us had run away that fateful night just over a month before. Only three of us would be going home. And nothing, nothing would ever be the same again."
Glasgow, 1965. Headstrong teenager Jack Mackay has just one destination on his mind--London--and successfully convinces his four friends, and fellow bandmates, to join him in abandoning their homes to pursue a goal of musical stardom.
Glasgow, 2015. Jack Mackay, heavy-hearted sixty-seven-year-old is still haunted by what might have been. His recollections of the terrible events that befell him and his friends some fifty years earlier, and how he did not act when it mattered most is a memory he has tried to escape his entire adult life.
London, 2015. A man lies dead in a one-room flat. His killer looks on, remorseless.
What started with five teenagers following a dream five decades before has been transformed over the intervening decades into a waking nightmare that might just consume them all.
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Carried Away: A Selection of Stories (Everyman's Library)
by Alice Munro
A dazzling selection of seventeen stories from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro—featuring an Introduction by Margaret Atwood
“Munro stands as one of the living colossi of the modern short story, and her Chekhovian realism, her keen psychological insight, her instinctive feel for the emotional arithmetic of domestic life have indelibly stamped contemporary writing.”—The New York Times
The stories brought together in Carried Away span a quarter century, drawn from Alice Munro’s earlier works. Here are such favorites as “Royal Beatings” in which a young girl, her father, and stepmother release the tension of their circumstances in a ritual of punishment and reconciliation; “Friend of My Youth” in which a woman comes to understand that her difficult mother is not so very different from herself; and “The Albanian Virgin,” a romantic tale of capture and escape in Central Europe that may or may not be true but that nevertheless comforts the hearer, who is on a desperate adventure of her own.
Munro’s incomparable empathy for her characters, the depth of her understanding of human nature, and the grace and surprise of her narrative add up to a richly layered and capacious fiction. Like the World War I soldier in the title story, whose letters from the front to a small-town librarian he doesn’t know change her life forever, Munro’s unassuming characters insinuate themselves in our hearts and take permanent hold.
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Too Much Happiness: Stories
by Alice Munro
Ten superb new stories by one of our most beloved and admired writers—the winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize.
In the first story a young wife and mother receives release from the unbearable pain of losing her three children from a most surprising source. In another, a young woman, in the aftermath of an unusual and humiliating seduction, reacts in a clever if less-than-admirable fashion. Other stories uncover the “deep-holes” in a marriage, the unsuspected cruelty of children, and how a boy’s disfigured face provides both the good things in his life and the bad. And in the long title story, we accompany Sophia Kovalevsky—a late-nineteenth-century Russian émigré and mathematician—on a winter journey that takes her from the Riviera, where she visits her lover, to Paris, Germany, and, Denmark, where she has a fateful meeting with a local doctor, and finally to Sweden, where she teaches at the only university in Europe willing to employ a female mathematician.
With clarity and ease, Alice Munro once again renders complex, difficult events and emotions into stories that shed light on the unpredictable ways in which men and women accommodate and often transcend what happens in their lives.
Too Much Happiness is a compelling, provocative—even daring—collection.
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Away from Her
by Alice Munro
From Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro, “a true master of the form” (Salman Rushdie), comes the brilliant short story that inspired the major motion picture starring Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent—featuring a Preface from Sarah Polley
“I’ve always loved Alice Munro’s writing, but this story punctured something. I read it, stunned, and let it sit there. It seemed to enter like a bullet. So concise and unsentimental, nothing to cushion the blow of its impact. When I was finished, I couldn’t stop weeping.”—Sarah Polley, from the Preface
Alice Munro has long been heralded for her penetrating, lyrical prose, and in “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”—the basis for Sarah Polley’s film Away from Her—her prodigious talents are once again on display. As she follows Grant, a retired professor whose wife, Fiona, begins gradually to drift away from him, we slowly see how a lifetime of intimate details can create a marriage, and how mysterious the bonds of love really are.
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Dear Life: Stories (Vintage International)
by Alice Munro
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Fourteen stunning short stories from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro, “one of the great short story writers not just of our time but of any time” (The New York Times Book Review).
“Wise and unforgettable. Dear Life is a wondrous gift; a reminder of why Munro’s work endures.”—The Boston Globe
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic, Vogue, The Washington Post, NPR, San Francisco Chronicle
In this brilliant collection, Alice Munro pinpoints the moment a person is forever altered by a chance encounter, an action not taken, or a simple twist of fate. Her characters are flawed and fully human: their stories draw us in with their quiet depth and surprise us with unexpected turns. And while most are set in her signature territory around Lake Huron, some strike even closer to home: an astonishing suite of four autobiographical tales offers an unprecedented glimpse into Munro’s own childhood.
Exalted by her clarity of vision and her unparalleled gift for storytelling, Dear Life shows how strange, perilous, and extraordinary ordinary life can be.
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Too Much Happiness (Vintage International)
by Alice Munro
A “profound and beautiful” (Francine Prose, O: The Oprah Magazine) collection of ten stories from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro
“Filled with subtle and far-reaching thematic reverberations. . . . Munro has an empathy so pitch-perfect . . . you are drawn deftly into another world.”—The New York Times Book Review
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, Kansas City Star, The Economist, Slate
With clarity and ease, Alice Munro renders complex, difficult events and emotions into stories about the unpredictable ways in which men and women accommodate and often transcend what happens in their lives.
In the first story, a young wife and mother, suffering from the unbearable pain of losing her three children, gains solace from a most surprising source. In another, a young woman, in the aftermath of an unusual and humiliating seduction, reacts in a clever if less-than-admirable fashion. Other tales uncover the “deep-holes” in a marriage, the unsuspected cruelty of children, and, in the title story, the yearnings of a nineteenth-century female mathematician.
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The Love of a Good Woman : Stories
by Alice Munro
In eight “riveting [and] lovely” (San Francisco Chronicle) stories, Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro stunningly explores the strange, often comical desires of the human heart.
“Superb . . . dazzling . . . Munro’s feel for her own characters is as pure as Chekhov’s.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)
“Munro is indisputably a master. . . . A better book of stories can scarcely be imagined.”—The Washington Post Book World
Mining the silences and dark discretions of provincial life, the eight tales in The Love of a Good Woman lay bare the seamless connections and shared guilt that bind even the loneliest of individuals. A stroke victim expresses his deepest secret to a young bride in what may be the last act of intimacy left in him. A daughter confronts her father with the open secret of his life. And in the riveting title story, a selfless nurse tending a dying patient discovers the social utility of lies.
Sparklingly detailed, unwaveringly courageous, these are stories that extend the limits of fiction.
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The Progress of Love
by Alice Munro
Eleven stunning stories that explore the most intimate and transforming moments of existence, from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro, “one of the foremost practitioners of the short story” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times).
“Throughout this remarkable collection moments of insight flash from the pages like lightning, not necessarily providing answers—more like showing the way to new questions.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer
A divorced woman returns to her childhood home where she confronts the memory of her parents’ confounding yet deep bond. The accidental near-drowning of a child exposes to the shaken mother the fragility between children and parents. A young man, remembering a terrifying childhood incident, wrestles with the responsibility he has always felt for his hapless younger brother. A man brings his lover on a visit to his ex-wife, only to feel unexpectedly closer to his estranged partner.
In these and other stories, Alice Munro proves once again a sensitive and compassionate chronicler of our times. Drawing us into the most intimate corners of ordinary lives, she reveals much about ourselves, our choices, and our experiences of love.
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Friend of My Youth: Stories
by Alice Munro
A “wickedly funny” (Newsweek) collection of ten short stories from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro, “one of the most eloquent and gifted writers of contemporary fiction” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times).
“Each of her collections demonstrates such linguistic skill, delicacy of vision, and . . . moral strength and clarity.”—Chicago Tribune
A woman haunted by dreams of her dead mother. An adulterous couple stepping over the line where the initial excitement ends and the pain begins. A widow visiting a Scottish village in search of her husband’s past—and instead discovering unsetting truths about a total stranger.
The miraculously accomplished stories in this collection not only astonish and delight, but also convey the unspoken mysteries at the heart of all human experience. The mastery—the almost numinous ability to say the unsayable—makes Friend of My Youth a genuine literary event.
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Selected Stories, 1968-1994
by Alice Munro
WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE® IN LITERATURE 2013
Spanning almost thirty years and settings that range from big cities to small towns and farmsteads of rural Canada, this magnificent collection brings together twenty-eight stories by a writer of unparalleled wit, generosity, and emotional power. In her Selected Stories, Alice Munro makes lives that seem small unfold until they are revealed to be as spacious as prairies and locates the moments of love and betrayal, desire and forgiveness, that change those lives forever. To read these stories--about a traveling salesman and his children on an impromptu journey; an abandoned woman choosing between seduction and solitude--is to succumb to the spell of a writer who enchants her readers utterly even as she restores them to their truest selves.
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Open Secrets: Stories
by Alice Munro
Eight stunning stories from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro, “a true master of the form” (Salman Rushdie).
“Open Secrets is a book that dazzles with its faith in language and in life.”—The New York Times Book Review
In these eight tales, Alice Munro reveals entire lives with a sureness that is nothing less than breathtaking, capturing those moments in which people shrug off old truths, old selves, and what they only thought was fate.
In Open Secrets, Munro evokes the devastating power of old love suddenly rekindled. She tells of vanished schoolgirls and indentured frontier brides and an eccentric recluse who, in the course of one surpassingly odd dinner party, inadvertently lands herself a wealthy suitor from exotic Australia. And Munro shows us how one woman’s romantic tale of capture and escape in the high Balkans may end up inspiring another woman who is fleeing a husband and a lover in present-day Canada.
The resulting volume resonates with sorrow, humor, and wisdom, and confirms Alice Munro’s reputation as one of the most gifted writers of our time.
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The Moons of Jupiter
by Alice Munro, Kristin Leutwyler
A spectacular tour of the moons of Jupiter in 106 stunning NASA images. Launched in 1989, Project Galileo is NASA's most ambitious interplanetary mission to date. The Galileo spacecraft is scheduled to crash into Jupiter's turbulent atmosphere in September 2003, nearly nine years after it entered orbit around the mighty planet. During this time, Galileo made a number of startling discoveries and transmitted more than 6,000 images of Jupiter and its many moons.
This book explores Jupiter's moons: Io, which simmers with more than 100 active cauldrons and spews lava fountains some 5,000 feet high; Europa, encrusted with salt-stained ice that may hide a once-living subterranean sea; Ganymede, the only moon in our solar system known to generate its own magnetic field; and Callisto, which may harbor a buried ocean and is one of the oldest and possibly unchanged places in our solar system; as well as Jupiter's so-called inner moons and thirty-two additional minor moons. It shows that the Jovian system is like none we know. 106 color illustrations
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The Moons of Jupiter
by Alice Munro, Kristin Leutwyler
Eleven “witty, subtle, [and] passionate” (The New York Times Book Review) stories from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro, “a true master of the form” (Salman Rushdie)
“Alice Munro’s fine and intelligent stories are like Edward Hopper paintings, lit with a relentless clarity, and richly illuminating the perplexities of human connection, their possibilities and pain.”—Washington Post Book World
In these piercingly lovely and endlessly surprising stories by one of the most acclaimed practitioners of the art of fiction, many things happen; there are betrayals and reconciliations, love affairs consummated and mourned. But the true events in The Moons of Jupiter are the ways in which the characters are transformed over time, coming to view their past selves with anger, regret, and infinite compassion that communicate themselves to us with electrifying force.
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Vintage Munro: Nobel Prize Edition (Vintage International)
by Alice Munro
Six of Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro’s revelatory short stories that unfold the wordless secrets that lie at the center of the human experience.
“Alice Munro is often able to say more in thirty pages than an ordinary novelist is capable of in three hundred. She is a virtuoso of the elliptical . . . the master of the contemporary short story. . . . Munro, like few others, [has] come close to solving the greatest mystery of them all: the human heart and its caprices.”—From the Presentation Speech, Nobel Prize in Literature 2013
Vintage Munro includes stories from throughout Alice Munro’s storied career: the title stories from her collections The Moons of Jupiter; The Progress of Love; and Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, as well as “Differently,” from Friend of My Youth; “Carried Away,” from Open Secrets; and “In Sight of the Lake” from Dear Life.
This edition includes the Nobel Prize Presentation Speech
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Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014 (Vintage International)
by Alice Munro
“An extraordinary collection” (San Francisco Chronicle) of twenty-four short stories from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro.
“Superb . . . Munro is a writer to be cherished.”—NPR
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Minneapolis Star Tribune
A selection of Alice Munro’s most accomplished and powerfully affecting short fiction from 1995 to 2014, these stories encompass the fullness of human experience, from the wild exhilaration of first love (in “Passion”) to the punishing consequences of leaving home (“Runaway”) or ending a marriage (“The Children Stay”). And in stories that Munro has described as “closer to the truth than usual”—“Dear Life,” “Working for a Living,” and “Home”—we glimpse the author’s own life.
Subtly honed with her hallmark precision, grace, and compassion, these stories illuminate the quotidian yet astonishing particularities in the lives of men and women, parents and children, friends and lovers as they discover sex, fall in love, part, quarrel, suffer defeat, set off into the unknown, or find a way to be in the world.
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A Wilderness Station: Selected Stories, 1968-1994 (Vintage International)
by Alice Munro
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • A “luminous” (Vogue) collection of twenty-eight stories from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro, “one of the finest contemporary story writers in the English language” (Newsday)—previously published as Selected Stories
“Her stories are like few others. One must go back to Tolstoy and Chekhov . . . for comparable largeness.”—John Updike, The New York Times Book Review
Spanning almost thirty years and settings that range from big cities to small towns and farmsteads of rural Canada, this magnificent collection brings together twenty-eight stories “about love, marriage, discontent, divorce, betrayal, impulsive passion, second thoughts, deaths, even murder—stories with plenty of drama and surprise as well as reflection and meditation” (The Wall Street Journal)—by a writer of unparalleled wit, generosity, and emotional power. In A Wilderness Station: Selected Stories, 1968–1994, Alice Munro makes lives that seem small unfold until they are revealed to be as spacious as prairies and locates the moments that change those lives forever.
A traveling salesman during the Depression takes his children with him on an impromptu visit to a former girlfriend. A poor girl steels herself to marry a rich fiancé she can’t quite manage to love. An abandoned woman tries to choose between the opposing pleasures of seduction and solitude.
To read these stories is to succumb to the spell of a true narrative sorcerer, a writer who enchants her readers utterly even as she restores them to their truest selves.
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Vintage Munro
by Alice Munro
WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE® IN LITERATURE 2013
Vintage Readers are a perfect introduction to some of the greatest modern writers presented in attractive, accessible paperback editions.
“In Munro’s hands, as in Chekhov’s, a short story is more than big enough to hold the world—and to astonish us again and again.” —Chicago Tribune
In an unbroken procession of brilliant, revelatory short stories, Alice Munro has unfolded the wordless secrets that lie at the heart of all human experience. She has won three Governor General’s Literary Awards in her native Canada, as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Vintage Munro includes stories from throughout her career: The title stories from her collections The Moons of Jupiter; The Progress of Love; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage; “Differently,” from Selected Stories, and “Carried Away,” from Open Secrets.
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The View from Castle Rock
by Alice Munro
A “revelatory” (The Boston Globe), “exhilarating” (The New York Times Book Review) collection of twelve stories that “[redraw] the boundaries between fiction and memoir” (O: The Oprah Magazine), from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro
“Munro really does know magic: how to summon the spirits and the emotions that animate our lives.”—The Washington Post Book World
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, Slate, Rocky Mountain News, New York, The Kanas City Star
A young boy, taken to Edinburgh’s Castle Rock to look across the sea to America, catches a glimpse of his father’s dream. Scottish immigrants experience love and loss on a journey that leads them to rural Ontario. Wives, mothers, fathers, and children move through uncertainty, ambivalence, and contemplation in these stories of hopes, adversity, and wonder.
The View from Castle Rock reveals what is most essential in Munro’s art: her compassionate understanding of ordinary lives.
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Every Father's Daughter: Twenty-four Women Writers Remember Their Fathers
by Jane Smiley, Ann Hood, Bobbie Ann Mason, Alice Munro, Maxine Hong Kingston, Bliss Broyard, Jayne Anne Phillips, etc
What is it about the relationship between fathers and daughters that provokes so much exquisite tenderness, satisfying communion, longing for more, idealization from both ends, followed often if not inevitably by disappointment, hurt, and the need to understand and forgive, or to finger the guilt of not understanding and loving enough? writes Phillip Lopate, in his introduction to Every Father's Daughter, a collection of 24 personal essays by women writers writing about their fathers. The editor, Margaret McMullan, is herself a distinguished novelist and educator. About half of these essays were written by invitation for this anthology; others were selected by Ms. McMullan and her associate, Philip Lopate, who provides an introduction. The contributors include many well-known writers Alice Munro, Jayne Anne Phillips, Alexandra Styron, Ann Hood, Bobbie Ann Mason, Maxine Hong Kingston, among others as well as writers less well-known but no less cogent, inventive, perceptive, lacerating, questioning, or loving of their fathers.
From the Foreword by Margaret McMullan
After my father died, I couldn't read or write, perhaps because, in the end, my father was unable to read or write. I didn't know it then, but I was looking for a collection of intensely personal essays, written by great women writers telling me about their fathers and how they came to know their fathers, a collection which might help me make some kind of sense of my own very close relationship with my father. I wanted to know from women, replacement sisters, if they had similar relationships with their fathers as I had with mine. Or, if their relationships were altogether different, I wanted to know how exactly these relationships were different. I wanted to know if the fact that my father was Southern had anything to do with anything. I suppose, more than anything, I just wanted to know that I wasn't alone in my love, my loss, my loneliness. I wanted to read this anthology, but it did not exist. Writers write the book they want to read. Editors do the same. This book came out of a need, my own, personal, selfish need.
Eventually, I contacted the authors I loved and admired some of them friends, some of them friends of my father s. I never wanted this to feel like an assignment, but I suppose it was. I simply asked these women to tell me about their fathers. They took it from there. For some authors, the idea of writing about a father just clicked, and they wrote their essays, often within days of the request. We all have stories about our fathers, even if it's a bad story or a non-story, it's a story. If you write, you will read these essays and feel the need to write your own.
I kept my father's tastes very much in mind during the difficult but joyful process of selecting essays for this book. This collection reflects my father, and, of course, other fathers as well. These essays are a sort of collage or mosaic of fatherhood and all the ways daughters communicate or don't with their fathers. Of course, there's a long list of wonderful women writers not included here this anthology really should extend itself into another volume.
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New Selected Stories
by Alice Munro
Winner of the nobel prize in literaturespanning her last five collections and bringing together her finest work from the past fifteen years, this new selection of alice munros stories infuses everyday lives with a wealth of nuance and insight written with emotion and empathy, beautifully observed and remarkably crafted, these stories are nothing short of perfection a masterclass in the genre, from an author who deservedly lays claim to being one of the major fiction writers of our time
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Dance of the Happy Shades: And Other Stories
by Alice Munro
Fifteen stunning short stories from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro, “a true master of the form” (Salman Rushdie).
“How does one know when one is in the grip of art—of a major talent? . . . It is art that speaks from the pages of Alice Munro’s stories.”—The Wall Street Journal
A young girl gets an unexpected glimpse into her father’s past when she realizes the sales call they’ve made one summer afternoon during the Great Depression is to his old sweetheart. A married woman, returning home after the death of her invalid mother, tries to release the sister who’d stayed behind as their mother’s caretaker. The audience at a children’s piano recital receives a surprising lesson in the power of art to transform when a not-quite-right student performs with unexpected musicality and a spirit of joy.
In Dance of the Happy Shades, Alice Munro conjures ordinary lives with an extraordinary vision, displaying the remarkable talent for which she is now widely celebrated. Set on farms, by river marshes, in the lonely towns and new suburbs of western Ontario, these tales are luminous acts of attention to those vivid moments when revelation emerges from the layers of experience that lie behind even the most everyday events and lives.
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The Beggar Maid Stories of Flo and Rose
by Alice Munro
“An exhilarating collection” (The New York Times Book Review) of ten blended stories from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro
“The rich texture of its narrative and the author’s graceful style make [The Beggar Maid] a considerable accomplishment.”—Joyce Carol Oates, Ms.
In this vibrant series of interweaving stories, Alice Munro recreates the evolving bond—one that is both constricting and empowering—between two women in the course of almost forty years. One is Flo, practical, suspicious of other people’s airs, at times dismayingly vulgar. The other is Rose, Flo’s stepdaughter, a clumsy, shy girl who somehow—in spite of Flo’s ridicule and ghastly warnings—leaves the small town she grew up in to achieve her own equivocal success in the larger world.
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