Carried Away: A Selection of Stories (Everyman's Library) | Alice Munro

Carried Away: A Selection of Stories (Everyman's Library) | Alice Munro | Vintage Munro...A Working-Class Writer

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Carried Away: A Se...

	Carried Away: A Selection of Stories (Everyman's Library) Alice Munro Everyman's Library, 2006 - 600 pages average customer review:based on 3 reviews view larger image
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(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

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.

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Great Stories, but Don't Settle for a Selection

These stories were purportedly selected by Alice Munro herself. Well, I guess Alice needs to make a living, too, as well as writing masterpiece after masterpiece. However, every story in the selection draws meaning and resonance from its original context in the suite of stories from which it was extracted. If you've never read Munro, I'd suggest getting the early collection Moons of Jupiter. If you're not blown away by that book, you wouldn't be "carried away" by the Everyman's Library selection either. On the other hand, if you are astonished by the emotional subtlety of the Moons, then you'll want to buy and read the other ten story-books as well!

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Vintage Munro...A Working-Class Writer

I have come to the fiction of Alice Munro late. She has been producing extraordinary short stories set in Ontario, Cananda mostly for decades. And she captures a working-class world for me that speaks to my own roots. The stories are about people first and I expect place secondly, but her sense of the culture and social stratification are so accurate they make me remember and realize. Her sense of detail and dialogue are also accurate and winning. I give this big compendium 5 stars, and recommend her to all.

A thoroughly wonderful and cohesive compendium of human experience

Using spare sentences and stark settings, Alice Munro covers in one short story a novel's worth of human experience. Each word is pregnant with nuance and meaning, as if she spent all of her time paring down her work until only the most esstential and core words remained. Even though the themes of her stories are permutations, read each story one at a time, appreciating it like the gem that it is. I will definitely read more of her work.

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