Best Selling Books by Alice Munro

Eleven stunning stories that explore the most intimate and transforming moments of existence, from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro, “one of the foremost practitioners of the short story” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times). “Throughout this remarkable collection moments of insight flash from the pages like lightning, not necessarily providing answers—more like showing the way to new questions.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer A divorced woman returns to her childhood home where she confronts the memory of her parents’ confounding yet deep bond. The accidental near-drowning of a child exposes to the shaken mother the fragility between children and parents. A young man, remembering a terrifying childhood incident, wrestles with the responsibility he has always felt for his hapless younger brother. A man brings his lover on a visit to his ex-wife, only to feel unexpectedly closer to his estranged partner. In these and other stories, Alice Munro proves once again a sensitive and compassionate chronicler of our times. Drawing us into the most intimate corners of ordinary lives, she reveals much about ourselves, our choices, and our experiences of love.

Rose and her stepmother, Flo, live in Hanratty-across the bridge from the "good" part of town. Rose, alternately fascinated and appalled by the rude energy of the people around her, grows up nursing her hope of outgrowing her humble beginnings and plotting an escape to university. Rose makes her escape and thinks herself free. But Hanratty''s question-Who Do You Think You Are?-rings in her ears during her days in Vancouver, mocks her attempts to make her marriage successful, and haunts her new career. In these stories of Rose and Flo, Alice Munro explores the universal story of growing up-Rose''s struggle to accept herself tells the story of our lives.

Cinta. Rasa bersalah. Gairah. Kehilangan. Aib. Keterasingan. Perkara keseharian yang begitu dekat, tapi di tangan Munro, kehidupan paling sederhana sekalipun selalu berhasil diramu menjadi kisah yang memikat. Empat cerita penutup yang disebut Munro "terasa autobiografis" akan membawa kita menilik kilasan masa kecil Munro; sesuatu yang belum pernah diceritakan Munro sebelumnya. Dengan sentuhan khas Munro, cerita-cerita ini menarik kita masuk begitu dalam kekehidupan karakter-karakternya dan mengejutkan kita dengan perubahan yang tak terkira. Dipuji sebagai penulis dengan kejernihan visi dan kemampuan bercerita yang tak tertandingi, melaluiDear Life, Munro menunjukkan betapa sebuah kehidupan biasa bisa menjadi begitu aneh, berbahaya, dan tak terduga. [Mizan, Bentang Pustaka, Alice Munro, Nobel Sastra, Novel, Terjemahan, Indonesia]

A true literary event, the publication of this generous selection of stories--drawn from Alice Munro''s seven collections spanning 30 years--gives enormous reading pleasure while it confirms Munro''s place in the front ranks of today''s writers of fiction. These 28 stories about lovers, parents and children, sex, seduction, marriage, murder, dreams, and death are pure essence of Munro.

A “masterful” (Houston Post) collection of stories from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro “A spellbinding tour through a world of love, menace, and surprise . . . [Munro] is a writer of enormous gifts and perception.”—Los Angeles Times The sisters, mothers and daughters, aunts, grandmothers, and friends in these thirteen stories, “a rich exploration of womanhood” (Ms.), shimmer with hope and love, anger and reconciliation, as they content with their histories and their present, and what they can see of the future. In her remarkable second collection, Alice Munro demonstrates the precise observation, straightforward prose style, and masterful technique hailed by John Updike, who wrote in the New York Times Book Review that “one must go back to Tolstoy and Chekhov . . . for comparable largeness.”

In eight “riveting [and] lovely” (San Francisco Chronicle) stories, Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro stunningly explores the strange, often comical desires of the human heart. “Superb . . . dazzling . . . Munro’s feel for her own characters is as pure as Chekhov’s.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice) “Munro is indisputably a master. . . . A better book of stories can scarcely be imagined.”—The Washington Post Book World Mining the silences and dark discretions of provincial life, the eight tales in The Love of a Good Woman lay bare the seamless connections and shared guilt that bind even the loneliest of individuals. A stroke victim expresses his deepest secret to a young bride in what may be the last act of intimacy left in him. A daughter confronts her father with the open secret of his life. And in the riveting title story, a selfless nurse tending a dying patient discovers the social utility of lies. Sparklingly detailed, unwaveringly courageous, these are stories that extend the limits of fiction.

Del Jordan''s said goodbye to childhood - to catching frogs, grazing knees, singing songs to save England from Hitler - and now she''s impatient for more. Just like the girls in the movies, she wants to get started on real life.

My Best Stories is a dazzling selection of stories—seventeen favourites chosen by the author from across her distinguished career. The stories are arranged in the order in which they were written, allowing even the most devoted Munro admirer to discover how her work developed. "Royal Beatings" shows us right away how far we are from the romantic world of happy endings. "The Albanian Virgin" smashes the idea that all of her stories are set in B.C. or in Ontario''s "Alice Munro Country." "A Wilderness Station" breaks short story rules by transporting us back to the 1830s and then jumping forward more than a hundred years. And the final story, "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," which was adapted into the film Away from Her, leads us far beyond the turkey-plucking world of young girls into unflinching old age. Every story in this selection is superb. It is a book to read—and reread—very slowly, savouring each separate story. This collection of small masterpieces deserves a place in every book lover''s home.

It presents 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. 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 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. 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.

A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” Selection With hardly any notice, foolish and plain housekeeper Johanna flees her employer and sets off to find the man she’s fallen in love with. Little does she know that her correspondence with him has been a complete fabrication, a cruel teenager’s idea of a practical joke. So, who will Johanna find when she steps off her train with the household furniture in tow? Alice Munro is the universally celebrated master of the contemporary short story, the Chekhov of our time. Nowhere are her powers better on display than in this exquisitely crafted story exploring the wonderful and unexpected places where love, or the illusion of it, can lead. This selection is the title story of Munro’s acclaimed collection, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage and the basis of the 2013 film, Hateship Loveship. An ebook short.

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.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Eight “sparkling [and] beautifully drawn” (Entertainment Weekly) stories about love and its infinite betrayals and surprises, from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro “Each of the stories in Runaway contains enough lived life to fill a typical novel.”—The Boston Globe One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century WINNER OF THE GILLER PRIZE • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Atlantic Monthly, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, San Jose Mercury News, Kansas City Star The runaway of the title story is a young woman who, though she thinks she wants to, is incapable of leaving her husband. In “Passion,” a country girl emerging into the larger world via a job in a resort hotel discovers a single moment of stunning insight and the limits and lies of that mysterious emotion. Three stories, the inspiration for the award–winning movie Julieta, are about a woman named Juliet—in the first, she escapes from teaching at a girls’ school into a wild and irresistible love match; in the second she returns with her child to the home of her parents, whose life and marriage she finally begins to examine; and in the last, her child, caught, she mistakenly thinks, in the grip of a religious cult, vanishes into an unexplained and profound silence. In the final story, “Powers,” a young woman with the ability to read the future sets off a chain of events that involves her husband-to-be and a friend in a lifelong pursuit of what such a gift really means, and who really has it. In Munro’s hands, the people she writes about—women of all ages and circumstances, and their friends, lovers, parents, and children—become as vivid as our own neighbors. It is her miraculous gift to make these stories as real and unforgettable as our own.

In her lengthy and fascinating introduction Margaret Atwood says “Alice Munro is among the major writers of English fiction of our time. . . . Among writers themselves, her name is spoken in hushed tones.” This splendid gift edition is sure to delight Alice Munro’s growing body of admirers, what Atwood calls her “devoted international readership.” Long-time fans of her stories will enjoy meeting old favourites, where their new setting in this book may reveal new sides to what once seemed a familiar story; devoted followers may even dispute the exclusion of a specially-beloved story. Readers lucky enough to have found her recently will be delighted, as one masterpiece succeeds another. The 17 stories are carefully arranged in the order in which she wrote them, which allows us to follow the development of her range. “A Wilderness Station,” for example, breaks “short story rules” by taking us right back to the 1830s then jumping forward more than 100 years. “The Albanian Virgin” destroys the idea that her stories are set in B.C. or in Ontario’s “Alice Munro Country.” And “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” the story behind the film Away From Her, takes us far from the world of young girls learning about sex into unflinching old age. This is a book to read slowly, savouring each story. It deserves a place in every Canadian book-lover’s library.

“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.

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.