Staff Picks
Remembering Alice Munro 1931-2024
- Megan M.
- Thursday, May 16
Collection
Nobel Laureate and Queen of the Short Story Alice Munro has passed away at 92.
Dance of the Happy Shades and Other Stories
Published in 1998
Fifteen stories about life in rural Ontario deal with adolescence, loneliness, broken hearts, an abandoned wife, family relations, blind dates, and an aspiring writer.
Dear Life
Published in 2012
A collection of stories illuminates moments that shape a life, from a dream or a sexual act to simple twists of fate, and is set in the countryside and towns of Lake Huron.
Dear Life
Published in 2012
This collection of stories illuminates moments that shape a life, from a dream or a sexual act to simple twists of fate that turn a person out of his or her accustomed path and into another way of being. Set in the countryside and towns of Lake Huron, these stories about departures and beginnings, accidents, dangers, and homecomings both virtual and real, paint a portrait of how strange, dangerous, and extraordinary the ordinary life can be.
Dear Life
Stories
Published in 2012
A collection of stories illuminates moments that shape a life, from a dream or a sexual act to simple twists of fate, and is set in the countryside and towns of Lake Huron.
Dear Life
Stories
Published in 2012
Alice Munro illuminates 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 about departures and beginnings, accidents, dangers, and homecomings both virgual and real paint a vivid and lasting portrait of how strange, dangerous, and extraordinary the ordinary life can be.
Family Furnishings
Published in 2014
From the winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature--and one of our most beloved writers--a new selection of her peerless short fiction, gathered from the collections of the last two decades, a companion volume to Selected Stories (1968-1994). Family Furnishings brings us twenty-four of Alice Munro's most accomplished, most powerfully affecting stories, many of them set in the territory she has so brilliantly made her own: the small towns and flatlands of southwestern Ontario. Subtly honed with her hallmark precision, grace, and compassion, these stories illuminate the quotidian yet extraordinary particularity 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. Peopled with characters as real to us as we are to ourselves, Munro's stories encompass the fullness of human experience--from the wild exhilaration of first love, in "Passion," to the lengths a once-straying husband will go to make his wife happy as her memory fades, in "The Bear Came Over the Mountain." Other stories suggest the punishing consequences of leaving home ("Runaway") or leaving a marriage ("The Children Stay"). The part romantic love plays in one's existence is explored in "Too Much Happiness," based on the life of the noted nineteenth-century mathematician, Sophia Kovalevsky. And in stories that Munro has described as "closer to the truth than usual"--"Dear Life," "Working for a Living," and "Home" among them--we glimpse the author's own life. As the Nobel Prize presentation speech says in part: "Reading one of Alice Munro's texts is like watching a cat walk across a laid dinner table. A brief short story can often cover decades, summarizing a life, as she moves deftly between different periods. No wonder 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 and the master of the contemporary short story." From the Hardcover edition.
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
Published in 2002
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.
Lives of Girls and Women
Published in 2001
A 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.
The Love of a Good Woman
Stories
Published in 1999
An anthology of stories probing the human psyche. In the title story, a woman prepares to put her life on the line to get a man. She will confront him with a murder he committed, at which point he might kill her, but if he doesn't she will have him in her power.
Las Lunas De Júpiter
Published in 2013
Eleven short stories of heartbreak and the sadness of aging women.
The Progress of Love
Published in 2000
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.
Runaway
Published in 2014
The incomparable Alice Munro's bestselling and rapturously acclaimed Runaway is a book of extraordinary stories about women of all ages and circumstances-and about love and its infinite betrayals and surprises. The runaway of the title story is a young woman who is incapable of leaving her husband. In "Passion," a country girl emerging into the larger world via a job in a resort hotel discovers, in a single moment of insight, the limits and lies of passion. Three stories concern a woman named Juliet-in the first, she escapes from teaching at a girls' school into a wild love affair; in the second, she returns with her child to the home of her parents, whose marriage she finally begins to examine; and in the last, her vanished child turns up caught in the grip of a religious cult. In these and other stories, Alice Munro's understanding of the people about whom she writes makes their lives as real as our own.
Runaway
Stories
Published in 2007
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. 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 day after his wife's funeral); how, years later, she brings baby Penelope back east to show her parents and learns sad secrets about their marriage; and how, twenty years on, she visits the estranged Penelope in her cult-like B.C. community. The result is more powerful than most novels, a quality in Alice Munro's stories that has been noted by many reviewers. The final story, "Powers," spans 50 years and runs from Goderich to Vancouver and involves a cast of four characters, each of whom steps forward to dominate the scene, not least Tessa, the plain girl whose psychic powers take her on the vaudeville circuit.
Too Much Happiness
Published in 2009
Ten superb new stories by one of our most beloved and admired writers--the winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize.>In the first story a young wife and mother receives release from the unbearable pain of losing her three children 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 ...
Too Much Happiness
Stories
Published in 2009
Nine new short works include the stories of a grieving mother who is aided by a surprising source, a woman's response to a humiliating seduction, and a nineteenth-century Russian émigré's winter journey to the Riviera.
The View from Castle Rock
Published in 2006
Some of these personal stories are imagined from Alice Munro's family history. Some are set in Scotland, where good liquor and amorous adventures temper the hard lives of legendary forbears in a place described by local records as having "no advantages." Others take place in the more familiar Munro territory around Lake Huron. All will amaze and delight listeners with their rich insights and astonishing epiphanies.
The View from Castle Rock
Stories
Published in 2006
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.
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
Stories
Published in 2008
A superb new collection from one of our best and best-loved 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 illumine the arc of an entire life. Men and women are subtly revealed. Personal histories, both complex and simple, unfold in rich detail of circumstance and feeling. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage provides the deep pleasures and rewards that Alice Munro's large and ever-growing audience has come to expect.
Las Lunas De Júpiter
Published in 2013
"...Pero los hechos que realmente subyacen en Las lunas de Júpiter son las transformaciones que sufren los personajes con el paso del tiempo hasta observar su pasado9 con la ira, el resentimiento y la compasión infinita que nadie sabe comunicarnos como Alice Munro."-- Provided by publisher.
Friend of My Youth
Published in 2021
In the powerful, haunting stories of Munro's new collection, men and women, in the midst of contemporary quandaries and crises, recall the long-buried yearnings, dreams, and hard choices that have given shape to their lives. [Friend of My Youth is] a wonderful collection of stories, beautifully written and deeply felt. It is difficult to do justice to Munro's magical way with characterization or to her unerring control of her own resources, she writes... with a trenchant knowledge of life and fiction as conspiring forces of creation. Munro is an established author, one of the few who have mastered the art of short story writing... 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... readers will find these stories entertaining and often thought-provoking. Recommended.