Selected Stories

Description

The first-ever selection of one of the world's greatest living short-story writers, winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2009. This first-ever selection of Alice Munro's stories sums up her genius. Her territory is the secrets that cackle beneath the fa ade of everyday lives, the pain and promises, loves and fears of apparently ordinary men and women whom she renders extraordinary and unforgettable.

Winner of the Man Booker International Prize for 2009, Alice Munro is the author of eleven collections of stories, most recently The View from Castle Rock, 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.

Munro is a great realist, and her powers come from her sense of the way in which communities - especially small, socially anxious, limited ones - construct and guard their reality. -- James Wood * London Review of Books * 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... An outstanding showcase for Munro's scrupulous, humane, unnervingly perceptive vision * 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... To say that she has made the short story her own and reinvigorated it somehow falls short - she has reinvented it * Observer *