Book description
This first-ever selection of Alice Munro's stories sums up her genius.
Her territory is the secrets that cackle beneath the façade of everyday
lives, the pain and promises, loves and fears of apparently ordinary men
and women whom she renders extraordinary and unforgettable. One of the
most esteemed writers in the world...Few writers capture the moral
ambiguities, murkiness, messiness - and joy - of relationships with as
much empathy and grace as Munro Guardian Her work is practically
perfect. Any writer has to gawk when reading her because her work is
very subtle and precise -- Jane Smiley The best short story writer
alive... Munro can pack more into one of her stories - more subtlety,
more grace, more tender twists of the human heart - than many novelists
do in a lifetime's oeuvre Independent One of the world's best living
short-story writers...say that she has made the short story her own and
reinvigorated it somehow falls short - she has reinvented it Observer
Munro's stories enact what can only be called a sort of magic -- Ali
Smith Winner of the Man Booker International Prize for 2009, Alice
Munro is the author of twelve collections of stories, most recently
Too Much Happiness
, and a novel, Lives of Girls and Women
. She has received many awards and prizes, including three of Canada's
Governor General's Literary Awards and two Giller Prizes, the Rea Award
for the Short Story, the Lannan Literary Award, the W. H. Smith Book
Award in the UK, the National Book Critics Circle Award in the US, and
was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for The Beggar Maid
. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The
Paris Review
, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into
thirteen languages. She lives with her husband in Clinton, Ontario, near
Lake Huron in Canada.
