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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
"
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.
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