Alice Munro - Dance of the Happy Shades: And Other Stories

Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published twelve collections of stories and two volumes of selected stories, as well as a novel. During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including three of Canadas Governor Generals Literary Awards and two of its Giller Prizes, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Lannan Literary Award, Englands W. H. Smith Book Award, the United States National Book Critics Circle Award, the Edward MacDowell Medal in literature, and the Man Booker International Prize. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. Alice Munro lives in Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron.

With clarity and ease, Alice Munro renders complex, difficult events and emotions into nine superb new stories that shed light on the unpredictable ways in which men and women accommodate and often transcend what happens in their lives. Too Much Happiness is a compelling, provocativeeven daringcollection.

Available November 2009 in hardcover from Knopf
$25.95 320 pages 978-0-307-26976-8

Please visit www.aaknopf.com

THE BEGGAR MAID

In this exhilarating series of interweaving stories, Alice Munro recreates the evolving bondone that is both constricting and empoweringbetween two women in the course of almost forty years. One is Flo, practical, suspicious of other peoples airs, at times dismayingly vulgar. The other is Rose, Flos stepdaughter, a clumsy, shy girl who somehowin spite of Flos ridicule and ghastly warningsleaves the small town she grew up in to achieve her own equivocal success in the larger world.

Fiction/Short Stories

HATESHIP, FRIENDSHIP, COURTSHIP, LOVESHIP, MARRIAGE

In the nine breathtaking stories that make up this celebrated collection, Munro achieves new heights, creating narratives that loop and swerve like memory and conjuring up characters as thorny and contradictory as people we know ourselves. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is tirelessly observant, serenely free of illusion, and deeply and gloriously humane.

Fiction/Literature/Short Stories

THE LOVE OF A GOOD WOMAN

Mining the silences and dark discretions of provincial life, these tales lay bare the seamless connections and shared guilt that bind even the loneliest individuals. Munro evokes the vagaries of love, the tension and deceit that lie in wait under the polite surfaces of society, and the strange, often comical desires of the human heart.

Fiction/Literature/Short Stories/

THE MOONS OF JUPITER

In these piercingly lovely and endlessly surprising stories by one of the most acclaimed current 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.

Fiction/Short Stories

OPEN SECRETS

In Open Secrets, Munro uncovers the devastating power of old love suddenly recollected. She tells of vanished young schoolgirls, indentured frontier brides, an eccentric recluse who finds love at a dinner party, and a Canadian woman fleeing a husband and a lover. These stories resonate with sorrow, humor, and wisdom, confirming Munro as one of the most gifted writers of our time.

Fiction/Literature/Short Stories

THE PROGRESS OF LOVE

A divorced woman returns to her childhood home and 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 man brings his lover on a visit to his ex-wife, only to feel unexpectedly closer to his estranged partner. Drawing us into the most intimate corners of ordinary lives, Munro reveals much about ourselves, our choices, and our experiences of love.

Fiction/Literature/Short Stories

THE VIEW FROM CASTLE ROCK

Alice Munro mines her rich family background, melding it with her own experiences and the transforming power of her brilliant imagination to create perhaps her most powerful and personal collection yet. A young boy, taken to Edinburghs Castle Rock to look across the sea to America, catches a glimpse of his fathers dream. Scottish immigrants experience love and loss on a journey that leads them to rural Ontario. Wives, mothers, fathers, and children move through uncertainty, ambivalence, and contemplation in these stories of hope, adversity, and wonder.

Fiction/Literature/Short Stories

SOMETHING IVE BEEN MEANING TO TELL YOU

In these thirteen stories, 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 sisters, mothers and daughters, aunts, grandmothers, and friends 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.

Fiction/Literature/Short Stories

ALSO AVAILABLE
Away from Her
Dance of the Happy Shades
Friend of My Youth
Lives of Girls and Women
Selected Stories
Too Much Happiness
Vintage Munro

VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL
Available wherever books are sold.
www.randomhouse.com

With this brilliant collection, Munro explores the lives of various inhabitants of the countryside and towns around Lake Huron. In stories about departure, beginnings, accidents, and homecomings both virtual and real, Alice Munro paints a vivid and lasting portrait of how strange and remarkable dear life can be.

Available November 2012 from Knopf
Please visit aaknopf.com

After supper my father says, Want to go down and see if the Lakes still there? We leave my mother sewing under the dining-room light, making clothes for me against the opening of school. She has ripped up for this purpose an old suit and an old plaid wool dress of hers, and she has to cut and match very cleverly and also make me stand and turn for endless fittings, sweaty, itching from the hot wool, ungrateful. We leave my brother in bed in the little screened porch at the end of the front verandah, and sometimes he kneels on his bed and presses his face against the screen and calls mournfully, Bring me an ice cream cone! but I call back, You will be asleep, and do not even turn my head.