Alice Munro

In her lengthy and fascinating introduction Margaret Atwood says “Alice Munro is among the major writers of English fiction of our time. . . . Among writers themselves, her name is spoken in hushed tones.” This splendid gift edition is sure to delight Alice Munro’s growing body of admirers, what Atwood calls her “devoted international readership.” Long-time fans of her stories will enjoy meeting old favourites, where their new setting in this book may reveal new sides to what once seemed a familiar story; devoted followers may even dispute the exclusion of a specially-beloved story. Readers lucky enough to have found her recently will be delighted, as one masterpiece succeeds another. The 17 stories are carefully arranged in the order in which she wrote them, which allows us to follow the development of her range. “A Wilderness Station,” for example, breaks “short story rules” by taking us right back to the 1830s then jumping forward more than 100 years. “The Albanian Virgin” destroys the idea that her stories are set in B.C. or in Ontario’s “Alice Munro Country.” And “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” the story behind the filmAway From Her, takes us far from the world of young girls learning about sex into unflinching old age. This is a book to read slowly, savouring each story. It deserves a place in every Canadian book-lover’s library.

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.

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.

**A brilliant new collection of stories from one of the most acclaimed and beloved writers of our time.** Alice Munro’s peerless ability to give us the essence of a life in often brief but always spacious and timeless stories is once again everywhere apparent in this brilliant new collection. In story after story, she illumines the moment a life is forever altered by a chance encounter or an action not taken, or by a simple twist of fate that turns a person out of his or her accustomed path and into a new way of being or thinking. A poet, finding herself in alien territory at her first literary party, is rescued by a seasoned newspaper columnist, and is soon hurtling across the continent, young child in tow, toward a hoped-for but completely unplanned meeting. A young soldier, returning to his fiancée from the Second World War, steps off the train before his stop and onto the farm of another woman, beginning a life on the move. A wealthy young woman having an affair with the married lawyer hired by her father to handle his estate comes up with a surprising way to deal with the blackmailer who finds them out. While most of these stories take place in Munro’s home territory—the small Canadian towns around Lake Huron—the characters sometimes venture to the cities, and the book ends with four pieces set in the area where she grew up, and in the time of her own childhood: stories “autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact.” A girl who can’t sleep imagines night after wakeful night that she kills her beloved younger sister. A mother snatches up her child and runs for dear life when a crazy woman comes into her yard. Suffused with Munro’s clarity of vision and her unparalleled gift for storytelling, these tales about departures and beginnings, accidents and dangers, and outgoings and homecomings both imagined and real, paint a radiant, indelible portrait of how strange, perilous, and extraordinary ordinary life can be. ### Amazon.com Review **Amazon Best Books of the Month, November 2012:** You half expect a new collection of stories by the beloved Alice Munro to arrive already devoured: pages dog-eared (“I feel exactly the same way! How did she know?”), spine cracked, cover bent from the dozens of times each story deserves to be read. The best thing to say about Alice Munro is said so often, it doesn’t mean much anymore. But here it is for the record: She is a master of her craft. In *Dear Life* , her 13th collection, Munro again breathes life--real, blemished, nuanced life--into her characters and settings (usually her hometown in Huron County, Ontario). Her empathy is the greatest weapon in her arsenal, and it is on full display here. But the most satisfying part of the new collection is the last four stories, bundled together in what the author calls “Finale,” the closest she’ll ever come to writing about her own dear life. -- *Alexandra Foster* ### From Booklist *Starred Review* Munro’s latest collection brings to mind the expression, “What is old is new again.” As curiously trite and hardly complimentary as that statement may sound, it is offered as unreserved praise for the continued wonderment provided by arguably the best short-story writer in English today. Some of these 14 stories present new directions in Munro’s exploration of her well-recognized universe (rural and small-town Ontario), while other stories track more familiar paths, with characters and familial situations reminiscent of previous stories. That said, the truth is that on whatever level of reader familiarity Munro is working, in every story she finds new ways to make the lives of ordinary people compelling. “Amundsen” has a setting that will pique the interest of avid Munro followers, yet it is delivered with a tone surprising and even disturbing. A young woman ventures to a remote area to assume teaching duties in a TB sanitarium, soon entering into a dismal relationship with the head doctor. But with Munro’s care in craftsmanship and her trademark limpid, resonant style, the reader accepts that the depressing aftereffect is Munro’s intention. “Haven” will come to be considered one of her masterpieces: a quick-to-maturation piece, a fond specialty of Munro’s, this one is about a teenage girl going to live with her aunt and uncle while her parents do missionary work. In quite dramatic fashion, she observes that what might appear as somone’s acceptance of another person’s quirks may actually be indifference. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A first printing of 100,000 copies supports Munro’s international popularity. --Brad Hooper A brilliant new collection of stories from one of the most acclaimed and beloved writers of our time. Alice Munro’s peerless ability to give us the essence of a life in often brief but always spacious and timeless stories is once again everywhere apparent in this brilliant new collection. In story after story, she illumines the moment a life is forever altered by a chance encounter or an action not taken, or by a simple twist of fate that turns a person out of his or her accustomed path and into a new way of being or thinking. A poet, finding herself in alien territory at her first literary party, is rescued by a seasoned newspaper columnist, and is soon hurtling across the continent, young child in tow, toward a hoped-for but completely unplanned meeting. A young soldier, returning to his fiancée from the Second World War, steps off the train before his stop and onto the farm of another woman, beginning a life on the move. A wealthy young woman having an affair with the married lawyer hired by her father to handle his estate comes up with a surprising way to deal with the blackmailer who finds them out. While most of these stories take place in Munro’s home territory—the small Canadian towns around Lake Huron—the characters sometimes venture to the cities, and the book ends with four pieces set in the area where she grew up, and in the time of her own childhood: stories “autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact.” A girl who can’t sleep imagines night after wakeful night that she kills her beloved younger sister. A mother snatches up her child and runs for dear life when a crazy woman comes into her yard. Suffused with Munro’s clarity of vision and her unparalleled gift for storytelling, these tales about departures and beginnings, accidents and dangers, and outgoings and homecomings both imagined and real, paint a radiant, indelible portrait of how strange, perilous, and extraordinary ordinary life can be. ### Amazon.com Review **Amazon Best Books of the Month, November 2012:** You half expect a new collection of stories by the beloved Alice Munro to arrive already devoured: pages dog-eared (“I feel exactly the same way! How did she know?”), spine cracked, cover bent from the dozens of times each story deserves to be read. The best thing to say about Alice Munro is said so often, it doesn’t mean much anymore. But here it is for the record: She is a master of her craft. In *Dear Life* , her 13th collection, Munro again breathes life--real, blemished, nuanced life--into her characters and settings (usually her hometown in Huron County, Ontario). Her empathy is the greatest weapon in her arsenal, and it is on full display here. But the most satisfying part of the new collection is the last four stories, bundled together in what the author calls “Finale,” the closest she’ll ever come to writing about her own dear life. -- *Alexandra Foster* ### From Booklist *Starred Review* Munro’s latest collection brings to mind the expression, “What is old is new again.” As curiously trite and hardly complimentary as that statement may sound, it is offered as unreserved praise for the continued wonderment provided by arguably the best short-story writer in English today. Some of these 14 stories present new directions in Munro’s exploration of her well-recognized universe (rural and small-town Ontario), while other stories track more familiar paths, with characters and familial situations reminiscent of previous stories. That said, the truth is that on whatever level of reader familiarity Munro is working, in every story she finds new ways to make the lives of ordinary people compelling. “Amundsen” has a setting that will pique the interest of avid Munro followers, yet it is delivered with a tone surprising and even disturbing. A young woman ventures to a remote area to assume teaching duties in a TB sanitarium, soon entering into a dismal relationship with the head doctor. But with Munro’s care in craftsmanship and her trademark limpid, resonant style, the reader accepts that the depressing aftereffect is Munro’s intention. “Haven” will come to be considered one of her masterpieces: a quick-to-maturation piece, a fond specialty of Munro’s, this one is about a teenage girl going to live with her aunt and uncle while her parents do missionary work. In quite dramatic fashion, she observes that what might appear as somone’s acceptance of another person’s quirks may actually be indifference. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A first printing of 100,000 copies supports Munro’s international popularity. --Brad Hooper Dear Life: Stories Alice Munro **See at:** [Google](https://books.google.com/books?id=XvOzTB56MrAC), [9780307961044](https://www.worldcat.org/isbn/9780307961044) Fiction, Literary, Short Stories (Single Author), Women #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. A brilliant new collection of stories from one of the most acclaimed and beloved writers of our time. Alice Munro’s peerless ability to give us the essence of a life in often brief but always spacious and timeless stories is once again everywhere apparent in this brilliant new collection. In story after story, she illumines the moment a life is forever altered by a chance encounter or an action not taken, or by a simple twist of fate that turns a person out of his or her accustomed path and into a new way of being or thinking. A poet, finding herself in alien territory at her first literary party, is rescued by a seasoned newspaper columnist, and is soon hurtling across the continent, young child in tow, toward a hoped-for but completely unplanned meeting. A young soldier, returning to his fiancée from the Second World War, steps off the train before his stop and onto the farm of another woman, beginning a life on the move. A wealthy young woman having an affair with the married lawyer hired by her father to handle his estate comes up with a surprising way to deal with the blackmailer who finds them out. While most of these stories take place in Munro’s home territory—the small Canadian towns around Lake Huron—the characters sometimes venture to the cities, and the book ends with four pieces set in the area where she grew up, and in the time of her own childhood: stories “autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact.” A girl who can’t sleep imagines night after wakeful night that she kills her beloved younger sister. A mother snatches up her child and runs for dear life when a crazy woman comes into her yard. Suffused with Munro’s clarity of vision and her unparalleled gift for storytelling, these tales about departures and beginnings, accidents and dangers, and outgoings and homecomings both imagined and real, paint a radiant, indelible portrait of how strange, perilous, and extraordinary ordinary life can be.

Alfrida, for so long an admired, urbane exponent of big-city living to her young rurally isolated niece, has lost some of her gloss by the time she accepts a university place in the same city as her aunt. Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was originally published in the collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage.

There is a woman haunted by her dreams of her dead mother. There is an adulterous couple stepping over the line where the initial excitement ends and the pain begins. There is a widow visiting a Scottish village in search of her husband's past and instead discovering unsettling truths about a total stranger. The ten stories in this collection not only astonish and delight but also convey the unspoken mysteries at the heart of all human experience. ### From Publishers Weekly Munro's ( The Progress of Love ) unfailing sense of the timeless propels the stories in her seventh book to the point of quiet revelation. Writing often of Canadians in the provinces who look back on years past from the vantage point of middle or old age, she tells of an elderly man attempting a discreet exit from his life; a widow who seeks a better understanding of her late husband in his former Scottish stomping grounds; and a daughter who relates and then recasts a classic tale of female self-denial handed down as an uncomfortable inheritance by her mother. The last, the volume's title story, is an especially insightful work, suggesting both the opposition and communion between art and experience--between a daughter who will write as she likes and a mother whose steely mask forbids her to. It is difficult to do justice to Munro's magical way with characterization or to her unerring control of her own resources: she writes about the forging and dismantling of friendships, marriages, families and solitudes with a trenchant knowledge of life and fiction as conspiring forces of creation. BOMC and QPB alternates. Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. ### From Library Journal Munro is an established author, one of the few who have mastered the art of short story writing. This fine collection contains ten stories that are all good to read. Most--but not all--are about the inhabitants of small Canadian towns. The primary characters, mainly women, have diverse relationships with their families and other unusual acquaintances. The plots are sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, but always within the realm of realism. Very seldom does anything occur that seems too ridiculous to actually have happened to somebody one knows. Most readers will find these stories entertaining and often thought-provoking. Recommended for libraries already owning Munro's previous works and also for those that may have missed her in the past. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/89. *\- Mary Prokop, CEL Regional Lib., Savannah, Ga.* Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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.

As always, Alice Munro surprises us. While the nine stories in this new collection could not be written by anyone else, they are subtly different. The title story, for example, ranges from small-town Ontario just after the war to a near-deserted hotel on the bald Saskatchewan prairie. The setting may be strange, uncharted Munro territory, but the plot is familiar, with two lives changed forever by a random act of mischief that can never be revealed. "Floating Bridge" is also a typical Alice Munro story, but different. Forty-two-year-old Jinny is fighting cancer, and the front room in their middle-class home is turned into a sickroom. Her husband hires a girl to look after her, and they visit the girl's trailer park relatives. Class tensions are exposed ( *"You know you'll hurt their feelings," he whispered. "They're trying to be nice to you."* ), and then something both unbelievable and totally believable happens to conclude the story in a way the reader will never... In this superb collection from one of our finest writers, nine stories draw us immediately into that special place known as Alice Munro territory—a place where an unexpected twist of events or a suddenly recaptured memory can trace the arc of an entire life. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage provides the deep pleasures and rewards that Alice Munro’s large and ever-growing audience has come to expect.

Lives of Girls and Women is the intensely readable, touching, and very funny story of Del Jordan, a young woman who journeys from the carelessness of childhood through an uneasy adolescence in search of love and sexual experience. As Del dreams of becoming famous, suffers embarrassment about her mother, endures the humiliation of her body's insistent desires, and tries desperately to fall in love, she grapples with the crises that mark the passage to womanhood. Penguin Group (Canada) has published this edition of Lives of Girls and Women in a traditional Penguin design in celebration of being named 2008 Publisher of the Year.

‘Munro is still one of our most fearless explorers of the human being, as she descends, time and again, headlamp on full beam, pickaxe and butter-knife at the ready’The TimesSpanning her last five collections and bringing together her finest work from the past fifteen years, this new selection of Alice Munro's stories infuses everyday lives with a wealth of nuance and insight. Beautifully observed and remarkably crafted, written with emotion and empathy, 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.

<p>There is a remarkable magic in these eight matchless stories—stories set in Ontario, Australia, Europe; in dangerous mountains, forbidding wilderness, familiar towns. In the title story, a lawyer’s wife has a flash of insight—illogical, unprovable, and terrifying—into the fate of a missing teenager; in another, the appearance of a long-dead visitor reveals the grip of a former love. Munro 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. Yet the true magic lies in the way that Alice Munro makes everything here—unexpected marriages, elopements, acts of sudden vengeance—unfold with the ease of the inevitable. This is the mark of a great writer, and it is stamped on every page of this book.</p> <p><i>Open Secrets</i>, Alice Munro's eighth book, consists of eight matchless stories, each one as rich as a full novel. All of them provide compulsive reading -- and rewarding re-reading.<br><br>"<i>Perhaps you will be surprised to hear from a person you don't know and that doesn't remember your name</i>." These intriguing words begin a letter dated 1917 to the Librarian in Carstairs, Ontario (the heart of "Alice Munro Country"). The letter sweeps us away into a world of secrets and revelations where nothing -- not even a courtship by letter that leads, over time, to a solid marriage -- is as it originally seems.<br><br>The Ontario stories range from "A Wilderness Station," which gives an account of an 1852 tree-felling accident and sheds light on the harsh life of the pioneers, all the way to the present, where family names known to us appear again in a world of TV shows and snowmobiles.<br><br>Just as the stories range back and forth in time, they also travel far to distant...

<p>Runaway is a book of extraordinary stories about love and its infinite betrayals and surprises, from the title story about a young woman who, though she thinks she wants to, is incapable of leaving her husband, to three stories about a woman named Juliet and the emotions that complicate the luster of her intimate relationships. 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.</p> <p><i>"Runaway"</i> is the first story in this stunning collection, sure to be a runaway success. All of the eight stories here are new, published in book form for the first time. Two of the eight have never appeared anywhere, so this will be a special feast for the millions of Munro fans around the world.<br><br>Miraculously, these stories seem to have been written by a young writer at the peak of her powers. Alice Munro's central characters range from 14-year-old Lauren in "Trespass," through the young couple in "Runaway," whose helpful older neighbour intervenes to help the wife escape, all the way to a 70-year-old woman meeting a friend of her youth on a Vancouver street and sitting with him to recall their tangled lives fifty years earlier, through a web of cheerful lies.<br><br>Three of the stories, "Chance," "Soon," and "Silence," are linked, showing us how the young teacher Juliet meets her fisherman lover on a train (and, by terrible chance, visits his B.C. home on the... <p><i>"Runaway"</i> is the first story in this stunning collection, sure to be a runaway success. All of the eight stories here are new, published in book form for the first time. Two of the eight have never appeared anywhere, so this will be a special feast for the millions of Munro fans around the world.<br><br>Miraculously, these stories seem to have been written by a young writer at the peak of her powers. Alice Munro's central characters range from 14-year-old Lauren in "Trespass," through the young couple in "Runaway," whose helpful older neighbour intervenes to help the wife escape, all the way to a 70-year-old woman meeting a friend of her youth on a Vancouver street and sitting with him to recall their tangled lives fifty years earlier, through a web of cheerful lies.<br><br>Three of the stories, "Chance," "Soon," and "Silence," are linked, showing us how the young teacher Juliet meets her fisherman lover on a train (and, by terrible chance, visits his B.C. home on the...

<div><h3><br></h3>SOMETHING I'VE BEEN MEANING TO TELL YOU is a collection of 13 varied stories addressing the questions, fears, doubts and observations of childhood and adolescence. <br><br>“Munro, the hugely gifted chronicler, is fast becoming one of the world’s great totemic writers. . . . Each short story is a mansion of many rooms.” –<em>The New York Times Book Review</em><br><p>“How honest and how lovely. . . . A spellbinding tour through a world of love, menace and surprise. . . . [Munro] is a writer of enormous gifts and perception.” –<em>Los Angeles Times</em><br></p><p>“Wonderful. . . . A sheer pleasure.” –<em>Seattle Post-Intelligencer</em><br></p><p>“A rich exploration of womanhood. . . . A more supple, honest, sensitive and sympathetic imagination would be hard to find among writers of fiction today.” –<em>Ms.</em><br></p><p>“Masterful . . . proves beyond question Alice Munro’s trenchant ability to capture the essence of personality in the vagaries of human impulses. . . . It is hard to imagine a perception more acute.” –<em>Houston Post</em></p></div> <p>Discover Alice Munro’s remarkable early stories.‘Alice Munro’s stories are miraculous’ Sunday TimesThe sisters, mothers and daughters, aunts, grandmothers, and friends in these stories shimmer with hope and love, anger, and reconciliation, as they contend with their histories and their present, and what they can see of the future.</p> <p>Winner of the Nobel Prize in LiteratureWinner of the Man Booker International Prize 2009</p>

“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.

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 WorldMining 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.

"Munro's work endures-its wholeness of vision, its complexity of feeling, its tolerance of mind. " —Lorrie MooreThe characters who populate an Alice Munro story live and breathe; in the finely drawn detail of their lives we find a reflection of ourselves. Passions hopelessly conceived, affections betrayed, marriages made and broken: the joys, loves, and awakenings of women echo throughout these twelve unforgettable stories, laying bare the unexceptional and yet inescapable pain of human contact. From the opening story exploring family relations to the poignant story that closes the collection, this is “vintage Munro.”

<p>Brilliantly paced, lit with sparks of danger and underlying menace, these are dazzling, provocative stories about Svengali men and the radical women who outmanoeuvre them, about destructive marriages and curdled friendships, about mothers and sons, about moments that change or haunt a life. Alice Munro takes on complex, even harrowing emotions and events, and renders them into stories that surprise, amaze, and shed light on the unpredictable ways we accommodate what happens in our lives.</p> <p>Munro’s unsettling stories turn lives into art, and expand our world and our understanding of the strange workings of the human heart.</p> <p>A new collection of stories by Alice Munro is always a major event. This new collection -- her most personal to date -- is no exception.<br><br>Alice Munro's stories are always wonderful and so ingrained with truths about life that readers always want to know where they came from. In this book, Alice Munro tells us. <br><br>In her Foreword (an unusual feature in itself), she explains how she, born Alice Laidlaw in Ontario, in recent years became interested in the history of her Laidlaw ancestors. Starting in the wilds of the Scottish Borders, she learned a great deal about a famous ancestor, born around 1700, who, as his tombstone records, "for feats of frolic, agility and strength, had no equal in his day." She traced the family's history with the help of that man's nephew, the famous writer James Hogg, finding to her delight that each generation of the family had produced a writer who wanted to record what had befallen them. <br><br>In this way, she was able to follow the... <p>A new collection of stories by Alice Munro is always a major event. This new collection -- her most personal to date -- is no exception.<br><br>Alice Munro's stories are always wonderful and so ingrained with truths about life that readers always want to know where they came from. In this book, Alice Munro tells us. <br><br>In her Foreword (an unusual feature in itself), she explains how she, born Alice Laidlaw in Ontario, in recent years became interested in the history of her Laidlaw ancestors. Starting in the wilds of the Scottish Borders, she learned a great deal about a famous ancestor, born around 1700, who, as his tombstone records, "for feats of frolic, agility and strength, had no equal in his day." She traced the family's history with the help of that man's nephew, the famous writer James Hogg, finding to her delight that each generation of the family had produced a writer who wanted to record what had befallen them. <br><br>In this way, she was able to follow the...

These are beguiling, provocative stories about manipulative men and the women who outwit them.‘Brimming with intensely believable characters and rich social detail’ Sunday TimesA wife and mother whose spirit has been crushed finds release from her extraordinary pain in the most unlikely of places. The young victim of a humiliating seduction finds an unusual way to get her own back and move on. An older woman, dying of cancer, weaves a poisonous story to save her life. Alice Munro takes on complex, even harrowing emotions and events and renders them into stories that surprise, amaze, and shed light on the unpredictable ways we accommodate to what happens in our lives. Winner of the Nobel Prize in LiteratureWinner of the Man Booker International Prize 2009

<h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p><em>Too Much Happiness</em>. Real life assaults her central characters rather brutally--in the forms of murder and madness, death, divorce, and all manner of deceptions--but they respond with a poise and clarity of thought that's disarming--sometimes, even nonchalant--when you consider their circumstances. Her women move through life, wearing their scars but not so much wearied by them, profoundly intelligent, but also inordinately tender and thoughtful. There's more fact than fiction to these stories, rich in quiet, precise details that make for a beautiful, bewildering read. --_Anne Bartholomew_</p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Starred Review. Munro's latest collection is satisfyingly true to form and demonstrates why she continues to garner laurels (such as this year's Man Booker International Prize). Through carefully crafted situations, Munro breathes arresting life into her characters, their relationships and their traumas. In Wenlock Edge, a college student in London, Ontario, acquires a curious roommate in Nina, who tricks the narrator into a revealing dinner date with Nina's paramour, the significantly older Mr. Purvis. Child's Play, a dark story about children's capacity for cruelty and the longevity of their secrets, introduces two summer camp friends, Marlene and Charlene, who form a pact against the slightly disturbing Verna, whose family used to share Marlene's duplex. The title, and final, story, the collection's longest and most ambitious, takes the reader to 19th-century Europe to meet Sophia Kovalevski, a talented mathematician and novelist who grapples with the politics of the age and the consequences of success. While this story lacks some of the effortlessness found in Munro's finest work, the collection delivers what she's renowned for: poignancy, flesh and blood characters and a style nothing short of elegant. <em>(Nov.)</em> <br />Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p>

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**. ** *From the Trade Paperback edition.* WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE® IN LITERATURE 2013Vintage 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. From the Trade Paperback edition.