Carried Away: A Personal Selection of Stories; Introduction by Margaret Atwood

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.

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.

Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Everyman's Library
Published: 09/26/2006
ISBN: 9780307264862
Pages: 608
Weight: 1.37lbs
Size: 8.18h x 5.32w x 1.26d

Review Citations: New York Review of Books 12/21/2006 pg. 22
New York Times 12/10/2006 pg. 20
Christian Century 02/06/2007 pg. 43
Entertainment Weekly 10/25/2013 pg. 105