In these fifteen short stories--her eighth collection of short stories in a long and distinguished career--Alice Munro conjures ordinary lives with an extraordinary vision, displaying the remarkable talent for which she is now widely celebrated. Set on farms, by river marshes, in the lonely towns and new suburbs of western Ontario, these tales are luminous acts of attention to those vivid moments when revelation emerges from the layers of experience that lie behind even the most everyday events and lives.

"Virtuosity, elemental command, incisive like a diamond, remarkable: all these descriptions fit Alice Munro."--Christian Science Monitor

"How does one know when one is in the grip of art--of a major talent?....It is art that speaks from the pages of Alice Munro's stories."--Wall Street Journal

The first ever selection of her stories, from her earliest published work in 1968 to her latest in 1994. Her star is in the ascendant - winner of the 1994 W.H. Smith Award, shortlisted for the second time in 1995 for the Irish Times International Fiction Award. This wonderful selection of the greatest stories will demonstrate her genius, her versatility, her extraordinary humanity, and will delight new readers as well as her fans.

'Read not more than one of her stories a day, and allow them to work their spell slowly: they are made to last' Guardian When her father marries his second wife, Chrissy gets a new step sister. Three years older than her, Queenie is beautiful and kind, someone everybody wants to be friends with. Chrissy worships her. But when Queenie runs away at eighteen, their lives quietly diverge. Joyce Carol Oates has described Alice Munro's work as 'tales of domestic tragicomedy that seemed to open up, as if by magic, into wider, deeper, vaster dimensions.' Queenie is Munro at her subtle, heart-breaking best. 'One of the great short story writers not just of our time but of any time' New York Times Book Review

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE(R) IN LITERATURE 2013
A "New York Times" Notable Book
A "Washington Post" Notable Work of Fiction
A Best Book of the Year: "The Atlantic, "NPR, "San Francisco Chronicle," "Vogue," "AV Club
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In story after story in this brilliant new 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: a soldier returning from war and avoiding his fiancee, a wealthy woman deciding whether to confront a blackmailer, an adulterous mother and her neglected children, a guilt-ridden father, a young teacher jilted by her employer. Illumined by Munro's unflinching insight, these lives 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.

Alice Munro mines her rich family background, melding it with her own experiences and the transforming power of her brilliant imagination, to create perhaps her most powerful and personal collection yet.
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.

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE(R) IN LITERATURE 2013
Ten superb new stories by one of our most beloved and admired writers--the winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize.
With clarity and ease, Alice Munro once again 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 long title story, the yearnings of a nineteenth-century female mathematician.

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE(R) IN LITERATURE 2013
In the thirteen stories in her remarkable second collection, Alice Munro demonstrates the precise observation, straightforward prose style, and masterful technique that led no less a critic than John Updike to compare her to Chekhov. The sisters, mothers and daughters, aunts, grandmothers, and friends in these stories shimmer with hope and love, anger and reconciliation, as they contend with their histories and their present, and what they can see of the future.

""Runaway" is the first story in this stunning collection, sure to be a runaway success. All of the eight stories here are new, published in book form for the first time. Two of the eight have never appeared anywhere, so this will be a special feast for the millions of Munro fans around the world.
Miraculously, these stories seem to have been written by a young writer at the peak of her powers. 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. But it is Alice Munro's own powers that dominate this collection and that will amaze reviewers and readers. Howcan she keep getting better? How can any one person know so much about the heads and hearts of so many different people? And how can she weave them together in stories that delight academics and ordinary readers alike, making each new Alice Munro book a runaway bestseller?

"From the Hardcover edition.

In eight new stories, a master of the form extends and magnifies her great themes--the vagaries of love, the passion that leads down unexpected paths, the chaos hovering just under the surface of things, and the strange, often comical desires of the human heart.

Time stretches out in some of the stories: a man and a woman look back forty years to the summer they met--the summer, as it turns out, that the true nature of their lives was revealed. In others time is telescoped: a young girl finds in the course of an evening that the mother she adores, and whose fluttery sexuality she hopes to emulate, will not sustain her--she must count on herself.

Some choices are made--in a will, in a decision to leave home--with irrevocable and surprising consequences. At other times disaster is courted or barely skirted: when a mother has a startling dream about her baby; when a woman, driving her grandchildren to visit the lakeside haunts of her youth, starts a game that could have dangerous consequences. The rich layering that gives Alice Munro's work so strong a sense of life is particularly apparent in the title story, in which the death of a local optometrist brings an entire town into focus--from the preadolescent boys who find his body, to the man who probably killed him, to the woman who must decide what to do about what she might know. Large, moving, profound--these are stories that extend the limits of fiction.

In these piercingly lovely and endlessly surprising stories by one of the most acclaimed current 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 an anger, regret, and infinite compassion that communicate themselves to us with electrifying force.

In the nine breathtaking stories that make up her celebrated tenth collection, Alice Munro achieves new heights, creating narratives that loop and swerve like memory, and conjuring up characters as thorny and contradictory as people we know ourselves.
A tough-minded housekeeper jettisons the habits of a lifetime because of a teenager’s practical joke. A college student visiting her brassy, unconventional aunt stumbles on an astonishing secret and its meaning in her own life. An incorrigible philanderer responds with unexpected grace to his wife’s nursing-home romance. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is Munro at her best, tirelessly observant, serenely free of illusion, deeply and gloriously humane.

A remarkable early collection of stories by Alice Munro, the bestselling author of Dear Life, and one of the greatest fiction writers of our time. 'Alice Munro's stories are miraculous' Sunday Times 'No one else can - or should be allowed to - write like the great Alice Munro' Julian Barnes 'She sets down the pains and pleasures of living in a spare, singing prose, not a word wasted' Daily Telegraph 'Read not more than one of her stories a day, and allow them to work their spell: they are made to last' Observer 'She's the most savage writer I've ever read, also the most tender, the most honest, the most perceptive' Jeffrey Eugenides

In this series of interweaving stories, Munro recreates the evolving bond 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 leaves the small town she grew up in to achieve her own equivocal success in the larger world.

Alice Munro captures the essence of life in her brilliant new collection of stories. Moments of change, chance encounters, the twist of fate that leads a person to a new way of thinking or being: the stories in Dear Life build to form a radiant, indelible portrait of just how dangerous and strange ordinary life can be.

This classic collection--now revised and expanded--is the perfect introduction to Nobel Laureate Alice Munro's brilliant, revelatory short stories, in which she unfolds the wordless secrets that lie at the center of human experience.
The stories in this volume span Munro's career: The title stories from her collections "The Moons of Jupiter; The Progress of Love; "and "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage; "Differently," "from "Friend of My Youth; "Carried Away," "from "Open Secrets; "and (new to this edition) ""In Sight of the Lake," "from "Dear Life. Vintage Munro "also includes the text of the Nobel Prize Presentation Speech, given by Peter Englund, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy.

**WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE** **WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE** Alice Munro captures the essence of life in her brilliant collection of short stories. Moments of change, chance encounters, the twist of fate that leads a person to a new way of thinking or being: the stories in Dear Life build to form a radiant, indelible portrait of just how dangerous and strange ordinary life can be. 'Another dazzling collection of short stories' Observer 'Alice Munro is one of our greatest living writers...how lucky we are to have Munro herself and her subtle, intelligent and true work' Naomi Alderman, author of The Power

Covering the first half of Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro's career, these are some of the best, most touching and powerful short stories ever written This first-ever selection of Alice Munro's stories sums up her genius. Her territory is the secrets that cackle beneath the facade of everyday lives, the pain and promises, loves and fears of apparently ordinary men and women whom she renders extraordinary and unforgettable. This volume brings together the best of Munro's stories, from 1968 through to 1994. The second selected volume of her stories, 1995-2009 is also published by Vintage Classics.

Brilliantly paced, lit with sparks of danger and underlying menace, these are dazzling, provocative 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. Alice Munro takes on complex, even harrowing emotions and events, and renders them into stories that surprise, amaze and shed light on the unpredictable ways we accommodate to what happens in our lives. 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 (which involves reading Housman in the nude) 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. Other stories uncover the 'deep holes' in marriage and their consequences, the dangerous intimacy of girls and the cruelty of children. 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. Munro's unsettling stories turn lives into art, expand our world and our understanding of the strange workings of the human heart.

Alice Munro's territory is the farms and semi-rural towns of south- western Ontario. Described by one of her peers as going around with a 'delicate, rueful smile and a wicked pen', she says of herself: 'I guess that maybe as a writer I'm kind of an anachronism...because I write about places where your roots are and most people don't live that kind of life anymore at all. Most writers, probably, the writers who are most in tune with our time, write about places that have no texture because this is where most of us live.' In these powerful tales she brings the landscape of her childhood back to life as she deals with the self-discovery 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.

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.

Covering the second half of Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro's career, these are some of the best, most touching and powerful short stories ever written. 'Munro is still one of our most fearless explorers of the human being' The Times Spanning her last five collections and bringing together her finest work from the past fifteen years, this new selection of Alice Munro's stories infuses everyday lives with a wealth of nuance and insight. Beautifully observed and remarkably crafted, written with emotion and empathy, these stories are nothing short of perfection. A masterclass in the genre, from an author who deservedly lays claim to being one of the major fiction writers of our time.

This book presents the life and work of the Victorian landscape painter Alfred Augustus Glendening (1840-1921). With beautiful illustrations of his pictures, showing a timeless countryside, it explores Glendening's rapid rise from railway clerk to acclaimed artist. Whilst critics often reviewed his exhibited works, very little has been written about the artist himself. Here, new and extensive research removes layers of mystery and misinformation about his life, family and career, accurately placing him in the midst of the British art world during much of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. Glendening was a man from humble origins, working fulltime as a railway clerk, yet was able to make his London exhibition debut at the age of twenty. This would have been almost impossible before the Victorian era, an extraordinary period when social mobility was a real possibility. Although his paintings show a tranquil and unspoiled landscape, his environment was rapidly being transformed by social, scientific and industrial developments, while advances in transport, photography and other technical discoveries undoubtedly influenced him and his fellow painters. Celebrating his uniquely Victorian story, the book places Glendening within his historical context. Running alongside the main text is a timeline outlining significant landmarks, from political and social events to artistic and technical innovations. Thoroughly researched over many years, the narrative explores why and for whom he painted, his artistic training and inspirations. Painting at Hampton and Greenwich, beside the River Thames, Glendening soon discovered the Welsh hills and became a member of the Bettws-y-Coed Artists' Colony, founded by David Cox. His masterful landscapes also include views of the Scottish Highlands, the Lake District, the Norfolk Broads, the South Downs and the Isle of Wight. The book uncovers new information about the Victorian art world and embraces such aspects as Royal Academy prejudices, the popularity of Glendening's work at home and abroad, especially Australia and America, his use of photography, and the sourcing of his art materials. Family trees are included, and other artistic family members discussed, notably his son and pupil Alfred Illman Glendening (1861-1907). There is a comprehensive list of their exhibited works at the Royal Academy and other major institutions, and details of their paintings in public collections.