SALE ON NOW! PROMOTIONS
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.
A rich selection of 28 compact and resonant stories (they're novels in miniature, more often than not) drawn from seven highly praised collections previously published by the Ontario writer. Munro has been called, with good reason, North America's Chekhov. Her rich elaborations of seemingly commonplace lives, in which she invariably locates the imaginative heart of lives her characters wished and meant to have lived, have grown in power and complexity over the years, to the point where the best stories in her 1994 volume, Open Secrets ( A Wilderness Station and the magnificent Carried Away - surely one of the best stories of the last 50 years), have placed her in serious contention both for the Nobel Prize and for the designation of best living short-story writer (only William Trevor rivals her). Readers who don't know Munro's fiction should be directed toward such marvels as Dance of the Happy Shades, The Beggar Maid, and The Moons of Jupiter. But none should be neglected. Here, as Dryden said of Chaucer, is God's plenty. The collection of the year. (Kirkus Reviews)
