Carried away: a personal selection of stories; introduction by margaret atwood - alice munro

A dazzling selection of stories--17 favorites picked by the author--are collected here in one volume for the first time.

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE(R) IN LITERATURE 2013 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.

Alice Munro has been repeatedly hailed as one of our greatest living writers, a reputation that has been growing for years.

The stories brought together here span a quarter century, drawn from some of her earliest books, The Beggar Maid and The Moons of Jupiter, through her recent best-selling collection, Runaway.

Here are such favorites as Royal Beatings in which a young girl, her father, and stepmother release the tension of their circumstances in a ritual of punishment and reconciliation; Friend of My Youth in which a woman comes to understand that her difficult mother is not so very different from herself; and The Albanian Virgin, a romantic tale of capture and escape in Central Europe that may or may not be true but that nevertheless comforts the hearer, who is on a desperate adventure of her own.

Munros incomparable empathy for her characters, the depth of her understanding of human nature, and the grace and surprise of her narrative add up to a richly layered and capacious fiction.

Like the World War I soldier in the title story, whose letters from the front to a small-town librarian he doesnt know change her life forever, Munros unassuming characters insinuate themselves in our hearts and take permanent hold.