A Guide to Alice Munro Books

Family Furnishings is a selection of Munro’s most accomplished and powerfully affecting short stories that encompass the fullness of human experience, from the wild exhilaration of first love to the punishing consequences of leaving home or ending a marriage. And in stories that Munroe has described as “closer to the truth than usual,” we glimpse the author’s own life.

Spanning almost 30 years and settings that range from big cities to small towns and farmsteads of rural Canada, this magnificent collection brings together 28 stories by a writer of unparalleled wit, generosity, and emotional power. Munro makes lives that seem small unfold until they are revealed to be as spacious as prairies and locates the moments of love and betrayal, desire, and forgiveness that change those lives forever. To read these stories is to succumb to the spell of a true narrative sorcerer, a writer who enchants her readers utterly even as she restores them to their truest selves.

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. Vintage Munro also includes the text of the Nobel Prize Presentation Speech, given by Peter Englund, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy.

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 19-century female mathematician.

Alice Munro mines her rich family background, melding it with her own experiences and the transforming power of her brilliant imagination, to create perhaps one of her most powerful and personal collections.

Munro has long been heralded for her penetrating, lyrical prose, and in “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” — the basis for Sarah Polley’s film Away From Her — her prodigious talents are once again on display. As she follows Grant, a retired professor whose wife Fiona begins gradually to lose her memory and drift away from him, we slowly see how a lifetime of intimate details can create a marriage, and how mysterious the bonds of love really are.

Carried Away is a dazzling selection of stories — seventeen favorites chosen by the author from across her distinguished career. With an Introduction by Margaret Atwood.

Runaway is a book of extraordinary stories about love and its infinite betrayals and surprises, from the title story about a young woman who, though she thinks she wants to, is incapable of leaving her husband, to three stories about a woman named Juliet and the emotions that complicate the luster of her intimate relationships. 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.

In the 13 stories in this remarkable collection, 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 characters 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.

In the nine breathtaking stories that make up this collection, Alice Munro creates narratives that loop and swerve like memory, conjuring up characters as thorny and contradictory as people we know ourselves.

In Munro’s debut novel, we follow Del Jordan who lives out at the end of the Flats Road on her father’s fox farm in 1940s rural Ontario. When she begins spending more time in town, she is surrounded by women — her mother, her mother’s boarder, and her best friend, Naomi. Through these unwitting mentors and in her own encounters with sex, birth, and death, Del explores the dark and bright sides of womanhood.

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 the fragility of the trust between children and parents. A young man, remembering a terrifying childhood incident, wrestles with the responsibility he has always felt for his younger brother. In these and other stories, 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.

In eight stories, a master of the form extends and magnifies her great themes. The rich layering that gives 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.

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.

In these eight tales, Munro evokes the devastating power of old love suddenly recollected. 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. 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 lover in present-day Canada.

The 10 miraculously accomplished stories in Munro’s Friend of My Youth not only astonish and delight but also convey the unspoken mysteries at the heart of all human experience.

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, and 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.

In these piercingly lovely and endlessly surprising stories, 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.