Alice Munro

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.

**Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature**These dazzling and utterly satisfying stories explore varieties and degrees of love - filial, platonic, sexual, parental and imagined - in the lives of apparently ordinary folk.

Eight stunning stories from Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro, "a true master of the form" (Salman Rushdie). "Open Secrets is a book that dazzles with its faith in language and in life."--The New York Times Book Review In these eight tales, Alice Munro reveals entire lives with a sureness that is nothing less than breathtaking, capturing those moments in which people shrug off old truths, old selves, and what they only thought was fate. In Open Secrets, Munro evokes the devastating power of old love suddenly rekindled. She tells of vanished schoolgirls and indentured frontier brides and an eccentric recluse who, in the course of one surpassingly odd dinner party, inadvertently lands herself a wealthy suitor from exotic Australia. And Munro shows us how one woman's romantic tale of capture and escape in the high Balkans may end up inspiring another woman who is fleeing a husband and a lover in present-day Canada. The resulting volume resonates with sorrow, humor, and wisdom, and confirms Alice Munro's reputation as one of the most gifted writers of our time.

Ranging from the 1850s to the present and from Ontario to Brisbane and Albania, these eight linked stories are concerned with the daily threads of life in two small Ontario towns. All the stories centre on unconventional women who refuse to let themselves be constrained by society or everyday life.

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATUREA woman haunted by dreams of her dead mother. The ten stories in this collection not only astonish and delight but also convey the unspoken mysteries at the heart of all human experience.

A "wickedly funny" (Newsweek) collection of ten short stories from Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro, "one of the most eloquent and gifted writers of contemporary fiction" (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times). "Each of her collections demonstrates such linguistic skill, delicacy of vision, and . . . moral strength and clarity."--Chicago Tribune A woman haunted by dreams of her dead mother. An adulterous couple stepping over the line where the initial excitement ends and the pain begins. A widow visiting a Scottish village in search of her husband's past--and instead discovering unsetting truths about a total stranger. The miraculously accomplished stories in this collection not only astonish and delight, but also convey the unspoken mysteries at the heart of all human experience. The mastery--the almost numinous ability to say the unsayable--makes Friend of My Youth a genuine literary event.

Eleven "witty, subtle, and] passionate" (The New York Times Book Review) stories from Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro, "a true master of the form" (Salman Rushdie) "Alice Munro's fine and intelligent stories are like Edward Hopper paintings, lit with a relentless clarity, and richly illuminating the perplexities of human connection, their possibilities and pain."--Washington Post Book World In these piercingly lovely and endlessly surprising stories by one of the most acclaimed 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 anger, regret, and infinite compassion that communicate themselves to us with electrifying force.

"An exhilarating collection" (The New York Times Book Review) of ten blended stories from Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro "The rich texture of its narrative and the author's graceful style make The Beggar Maid] a considerable accomplishment."--Joyce Carol Oates, Ms. In this vibrant series of interweaving stories, Alice Munro recreates the evolving bond--one that is both constricting and empowering--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--in spite of Flo's ridicule and ghastly warnings--leaves the small town she grew up in to achieve her own equivocal success in the larger world.