Carried Away: A Selection of Stories »

Alice Munro is hardly the typical writer of love stories. Throughout her more than fifty-year career, she has never pandered to an audience used to happy endings and perfect relationships. Instead, she writes with a maturity and honesty that reveals the true nature of love in all its heartbreaking complexity.

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

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 Love of a Good Woman," in which, when an old crime resurfaces, a woman has to choose whether to believe in the man she intends to marry.

Munro's 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 doesn't know change her life forever, Munro's unassuming characters insinuate themselves in our hearts and take permanent hold.

The New York Times - A. O. Scott

"These are stories," Alice Munro writes in the foreword to her new collection, The View From Castle Rock, and at first glance this note of insistence may seem a little odd. What else would they be? What else, apart from the one novel (Lives of Girls and Women, which is more like a cycle of stories), has Munro written over the past 40 years or so? Not, of course, that she needs to write anything else. Those stories, 17 of which have been gathered by the author into a hefty new Everyman's Library volume with the title Carried Away, have built a reputation that Margaret Atwood, introducing the Everyman book, describes as "international literary sainthood." More to the point, Munro's stories are composed with a clarity and economy that make novel-writing look downright superfluous and self-indulgent.

Introduction by Margaret Atwood Select Bibliography Chronology

Royal Beatings The Beggar Maid The Turkey Season The Moons of Jupiter The Progress of Love Miles City, Montana Friend of My Youth Meneseteung Differently Carried Away The Albanian Virgin A Wilderness Station Vandals Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage Save the Reaper Runaway The Bear Came Over the Mountain