From the winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature--and one of our most belov
ed writers--a new selection of her peerless short fiction, gathered from the col
lections of the last two decades, a companion volume to "Selected Stories" (1968
-1994).
"Family Furnishings" brings us twenty-four of Alice Munro's most accom
plished, most powerfully affecting stories, many of them set in the territory sh
e has so brilliantly made her own: the small towns and flatlands of southwestern
Ontario. Subtly honed with her hallmark precision, grace, and compassion, these
stories illuminate the quotidian yet extraordinary particularity in the lives o
f men and women, parents and children, friends and lovers as they discover sex,
fall in love, part, quarrel, suffer defeat, set off into the unknown, or find a
way to be in the world.
Peopled with characters as real to us as we are to our
selves, Munro's stories encompass the fullness of human experience--from the wil
d exhilaration of first love, in "Passion," to the lengths a once-straying husba
nd will go to make his wife happy as her memory fades, in "The Bear Came Over th
e Mountain." Other stories suggest the punishing consequences of leaving home ("
Runaway") or leaving a marriage ("The Children Stay"). The part romantic love pl
ays in one's existence is explored in "Too Much Happiness," based on the life of
the noted nineteenth-century mathematician, Sophia Kovalevsky. And in stories t
hat Munro has described as "closer to the truth than usual"--"Dear Life," "Worki
ng for a Living," and "Home" among them--we glimpse the author's own life.
As
the Nobel Prize presentation speech says in part: "Reading one of Alice Munro's
texts is like watching a cat walk across a laid dinner table. A brief short stor
y can often cover decades, summarizing a life, as she moves deftly between diffe
rent periods. No wonder Alice Munro is often able to say more in thirty pages th
an an ordinary novelist is capable of in three hundred. She is a virtuoso of the
elliptical and the master of the contemporary short story."
