Most Popular Books 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.

In Friend of my Youth, Alice Munro once again dazzles with her finely nuanced depictions of the human heart. These ten stories bring to life characters in a remarkable variety of times and places. As always, Alice Munro''s people are as real and recognizable as ourselves.

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 film Away 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.

#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.

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.

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.

A selection of the stories of Alice Munro, from her earliest published work in 1968 to her latest in 1994. Monro won the 1994 W.H. Smith Award, and was shortlisted for the Irish Times International Fiction Award in 1995. Her novels include Open Secrets and The Beggar Maid.

Away From Her is a stunning collection of nine short stories that deal with the substance of adult life. They draw us immediately into that special place known as Alice Munro Territory - where an unexpected twist or a suddenly recaptured memory can trace the arc of an entire life. An aging couple''s relationship is tested as the woman develops Alzheimer''s disease and forgets her long years of marriage in the title story "Away from Her." The fate of a strong-minded house-keeper, just entering the dangerous country of old-maid hood, is unintentionally reversed by a practical joke. A college student visiting her aunt and recognizing the family furniture stumbles on a long-hidden secret and its meaning in her own life. A woman recollecting an afternoon''s wild lovemaking with a stranger realizes how the memory has changed and sustained her through a lifetime. Personal histories, both complex and simple, unfold in rich detail in this astonishing collection of stories, providing a further reason why Munro is often referred to as "our contemporary Chekhov." The short story "Away from Her" - originally titled "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" in the collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage - is now a major motion picture by Sarah Polley.

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.

“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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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.”

It presents stories about Svengali men, and radical women who outmanoeuvre them, about destructive marriages and curdled friendships, about mothers and sons, about moments which change or haunt a life. A wife and mother, whose spirit has been crushed, finds release from her extraordinary pain in the most unlikely place. 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. The long title story follows Sophia Kovalevsky, a late nineteenth-century Russian emigree and mathematical genius, as she takes a fateful winter journey that begins with a visit to her lover on the Riviera, and ends in Sweden, where she is a professor at the only university willing to hire a woman to teach her subject.

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.

Rose and her stepmother, Flo, live in Hanratty-across the bridge from the "good" part of town. Rose, alternately fascinated and appalled by the rude energy of the people around her, grows up nursing her hope of outgrowing her humble beginnings and plotting an escape to university. Rose makes her escape and thinks herself free. But Hanratty''s question-Who Do You Think You Are?-rings in her ears during her days in Vancouver, mocks her attempts to make her marriage successful, and haunts her new career. In these stories of Rose and Flo, Alice Munro explores the universal story of growing up-Rose''s struggle to accept herself tells the story of our lives.

Del Jordan''s said goodbye to childhood - to catching frogs, grazing knees, singing songs to save England from Hitler - and now she''s impatient for more. Just like the girls in the movies, she wants to get started on real life.

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

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.

Alice Munro is universally acknowledged as the finest short fiction writer in English. Bringing together ten incomparable stories from six different collections, No Love Lost confirms her pre-eminent status. Focusing on the many paths of falling in love, each of these stories of ordinary people reveals new truths about people as real – and as extraordinary – as ourselves. In selecting this unique gathering of stories, Jane Urquhart noted the brilliance of Munro’s fiction, suggesting that Munro''s genius guides us “through love’s labyrinth, insisting all the while that we keep our eyes wide open to its complicated foliage, its shadows, its piercing blasts of light.” Contents: Bardon Bus (from The Moons of Jupiter) Carried Away (from Open Secrets) Mischief (from Who Do You Think You Are?) The Love of a Good Woman (from The Love of a Good Woman) Simon’s Luck (from Who Do You Think You Are?), Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (from Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage) The Bear Came Over the Mountain (from Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage) The Albanian Virgin (from Open Secrets) Meneseteung (from Friend of My Youth) The Children Stay (from The Love of a Good Woman)

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.

My Best Stories is a dazzling selection of stories—seventeen favourites chosen by the author from across her distinguished career. The stories are arranged in the order in which they were written, allowing even the most devoted Munro admirer to discover how her work developed. "Royal Beatings" shows us right away how far we are from the romantic world of happy endings. "The Albanian Virgin" smashes the idea that all of her stories are set in B.C. or in Ontario''s "Alice Munro Country." "A Wilderness Station" breaks short story rules by transporting us back to the 1830s and then jumping forward more than a hundred years. And the final story, "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," which was adapted into the film Away from Her, leads us far beyond the turkey-plucking world of young girls into unflinching old age. Every story in this selection is superb. It is a book to read—and reread—very slowly, savouring each separate story. This collection of small masterpieces deserves a place in every book lover''s home.

In the stories that make up Dance of the Happy Shades, the deceptive calm of small-town life is brought memorably to the page, revealing the countryside of Southwestern Ontario to be home to as many small sufferings and unanticipated emotions as any place. This is the book that earned Alice Munro a devoted readership and established her as one of Canada''s most beloved writers. Winner of the Governor General''s Award for Fiction, Dance of the Happy Shades is Alice Munro''s first short story collection.

“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.

With an Introduction by A.S. Byatt Winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, the Trillium Book Award, and the O. Henry Award, and A 2004 CBC Canada Reads selection In The Love of a Good Woman, Alice Munro looks back to the beginning of the sixties and provides nothing less than a portrait of a generation.

From the 2013 Nobel laureate in Literature—and perhaps our most beloved author: a beautifully repackaged reissue of Alice Munro''s Selected Stories (1968-1994), now retitled A Wilderness Station 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. 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.

A fleeting affair lingers in the memory of a woman. Thirty years after the event, when both husband and lover have died, she remembers one further detail. Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was previously published in the collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage.

El último lector es uno de los ensayos que reflejan de forma más convincente el rico, complejo y siempre ambiguo universo de Ricardo Piglia.