Selected Stories

Volume One 1968-1994

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Summary

Covering the first half of Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro's career, these are some of the best, most touching and powerful short stories ever written.

‘Munro can pack more into one of her stories - more subtlety, more grace, more tender twists of the human heart - than many novelists do’ Independent

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.

This volume brings together the best of Munro's stories, from 1968 through to 1994. The second selected volume of her stories, 1995-2009 is also published by Vintage Classics.

‘Few writers capture the moral ambiguities, murkiness, messiness - and joy - of relationships with as much empathy and grace as Munro’ Guardian

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2009

Reviews

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

About the author

Alice Munro

Alice Munro was born in 1931 and was the author of thirteen collections of stories and the novel, Lives of Girls and Women. She 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 WHSmith Book Award in the UK, the National Book Critics Circle Award in the US, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Who Do You Think You Are? (previously published as The Beggar Maid), and was awarded the Man Booker International Prize 2009 for her overall contribution to fiction on the world stage, and in 2013 she won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. Alice Munro died in 2024.

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