Alice Munro

With her peerless ability to give us the essence of a life in often brief but spacious and timeless stories, Alice Munro illumines the moment a life is shaped -- the moment a dream, or sex, or perhaps a simple twist of fate turns a person out of his or her accustomed path and into another way of being. Suffused with Munro's clarity of vision and her unparalleled gift for storytelling, these stories (set in the world Munro has made her own: the countryside and towns around Lake Huron) about departures and beginnings, accidents, dangers, and homecomings both virtual and real, paint a vivid and lasting portrait of how strange, dangerous, and extraordinary the ordinary life can be.

stories

Dear life

A poignant portrayal of a young girl's youth in a Canadian town and her awakening to womanhood in the 1940s follows Del Jordan as she explores the dark and bright sides of womanhood and records the frustrations, joys, triumphs, and trials of small-town life. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

Lives of Girls and Women

A collection of short fiction captures the lives of women of all ages and circumstances, as they deal with the limits and lies of passion, unfulfilled dreams, motherhood, betrayal, and the bonds of love.

Stories

Runaway

A collection of short fiction explores the complexities of human relationships and emotions in stories about a housekeeper entering old-maidhood whose life is transformed by a practical joke and a lifelong philanderer who finds the tables turned.

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

A selection of short fiction drawn from the author's seven collections spans almost thirty years of work and includes twenty-eight tales dealing with such themes as love, parents and children, seduction, marriage, sex, murder, dreams, and death. Reprint. 35,000 first printing.

Selected Stories

Too much happiness

**Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature** Alice Munro has a genius for entering the lives of ordinary people and capturing the passions and contradictions that lie just below the surface. In this brilliant new collection she takes mainly the lives of women - unruly, ungovernable, unpredictable, unexpected, funny, sexy and completely recognisable - and brings their hidden desires bubbling to the surface. The love of a good woman is not as pure and virtuous as it seems: as in her title story it can be needy and murderous. Here are women behaving badly, leaving husbands and children, running off with unstuitable lovers, pushing everyday life to the limits, and if they don't behave badly, they think surprising and disturbing thoughts.

The Love of a Good Woman

**Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature** These are beguiling, provocative stories about manipulative men and the women who outwit them, about destructive marriages and curdled friendships, about mothers and sons, about moments which change or haunt a life. Alice Munro's stories surprise and delight, turning lives into art, expanding our world and shedding light on the strange workings of the human heart.

Too Much Happiness

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 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.

Friend of My Youth

Eleven stories, including "Miles City, Montanta", "Lichen", and "White dump", reveal the nature of power of love between children and parents, between siblings, and between estranged lovers.

The Progress of Love

"The characters who populate an Alice Munro story live and breathe. Passions hopelessly conceived, affections betrayed, marriages made and broken- the joys, fears, loves and awakenings of women echo throughout these twelve unforgettable stories, laying bare the unexceptional and yet inescapable pain of human contact."

The Moons of Jupiter

" A remarkable writer whose character emerge in shining clarity... A major talent is at work here " Los Angeles Times. Alice Munro's territory is the farms and semi-rural towns of south-western Ontario. In these dazzling stories she deals with the self-discovery of adolescence, the joys and pains of love and the despair and guilt of those caught in a narrow existence. And in sensitively exploring the lives of ordinary men and women, she makes us aware of the universal nature of their fears, sorrows and aspirations. " Munro's power of analysis, of sensations and thoughts is almost Proustian in its sureness ".

And Other Stories

Dance of the Happy Shades

Open Secrets

Originally published as: Who do you think you are? 1978.

Stories of Flo and Rose

The Beggar Maid

Who Do You Think You Are? . "All ten of the stories in the book follow the career of Rose, whom we first meet as a child growing up in the small town of Hanratty. Rose is a clever, shyly ambitious girl who is fascinated yet appalled by the rude energy of the people around her. After surviving the tensions and embarrassments of home and high school (and a bizarre sexual initiation on a train) she leaves the world of Hanratty and enters university. There, to the surprise of both families, she meets and marries Patrick, heir to a large West Coast fortune. Their married life in Vancouver is not a success, and produces a series of crises, guilty and unsuccessful affairs, and one child. In due course Rose leaves with her child and begins a successful career as an actress and interviewer. When finally she moves back east, we see her making a wary return to her home territory, a small-town girl who can never lose the small-town sense of involvement, of responsibility...."

Who Do You Think You Are?

A selection of signature short fiction from the past two decades includes pieces set in small Ontario communities and stands as a companion to the Nobel Prize-winning author's Selected Stories: 1968-1994. 100,000 first printing.

Selected Stories, 1995-2014

Family Furnishings

The View from Castle Rock

A compilation of short fiction journeys from the Scotland of the author's own family heritage and a ship en route to the New World, to a family odyssey from Illinois to Canada and in and around Lake Huron.

A new edition of the author's second, long out-of-print collection of stories captures the lives of characters ranging in from childhood and adolescence to old age, including those of two sisters bound together by unrequited loves past and present, a young girl's passion for a barnstorming pilot, and a woman dealing with her first husband's writing career. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

Alice Munro

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