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.

Too Much Happiness

Emiley Jones

At one time she thought that she could not live without coffee, but it turned out that it is really the warm large mug she wants in her hands, that is the aid to thought or whatever it is she practices through the procession of hours, or of days.

All that drunken insight, that exhilaration, cast out of her like vomit. Aside from that, she was not hungover. She could wallow in lakes of alcohol, it seemed, and wake up dry as cardboard, flattened.

She was learning, quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood—that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements. It could be brimful of occupations which did not weary you to the bone.

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