Selected Stories

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 *One of the most esteemed writers in the world… Few writers capture the moral ambiguities, murkiness, messiness - and joy - of relationships with as much empathy and grace as Munro… An outstanding showcase for Munro’s scrupulous, humane, unnervingly perceptive vision * Guardian *Her work is practically perfect. Any writer has to gawk when reading her because her work is very subtle and precise – Jane SmileyThe best short story writer alive… Munro can pack more into one of her stories - more subtlety, more grace, more tender twists of the human heart - than many novelists do in a lifetime’s oeuvre * Independent *One of the world’s best living short-story writers… To say that she has made the short story her own and reinvigorated it somehow falls short - she has reinvented it * Observer *Alice Munro! Now that’s writing – Margaret AtwoodThat Munro is a great writer of short stories should go without saying. She is also one of the two or three best writers of fiction (of any length) now alive * Sunday Times *This superb collection…confirms Munro’s place as the laureate of thwarted passion - and quite possibly the greatest short-story writer at work today * Daily Telegraph *

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.