Vintage Munro (24 page)

Ignoring her mother, she wrote, “You must not ask, it is forbidden for us to know—”

She paused, chewing her pencil, then finished off with a chill of satisfaction, “—what fate has in store for me, or for you—”

In this exhilarating series of interweaving stories, Alice Munro re-creates the evolving bond between two women in the course of almost forty years. One is Flo, practical, suspicious of other people’s airs, at times dismayingly vulgar. The other is Rose, Flo’s stepdaughter, a clumsy, shy girl who somehow—in spite of Flo’s ridicule and ghastly warnings—leaves the small town she grew up in to achieve her own equivocal success in the larger world.

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A young girl gets an unexpected glimpse into her father’s past. A married woman tries to release her homebound sister after the death of their mother. The audience at a piano recital gets a surprising lesson in the power of art to transform. In these early stories Alice Munro conjures ordinary lives with an extraordinary vision, displaying the remarkable talent for which she is now widely celebrated.

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A woman haunted by dreams of her dead mother. An adulterous couple stepping over the line where the initial excitement ends and the pain begins. A widow visiting a Scottish village in search of her husband’s past. The ten miraculously accomplished stories in this collection not only delight but also convey the unspoken mysteries at the heart of all human experience.

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In the nine breathtaking stories that make up her celebrated tenth collection, Alice Munro achieves new heights, creating narratives that loop and swerve like memory, and conjuring up characters as thorny and contradictory as people we know ourselves.
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
is Munro at her best—tirelessly observant, serenely free of illusion, deeply and gloriously humane.

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The only novel by Alice Munro, this book chronicles a young girl’s growing up in rural Ontario in the 1940s. Del Jordan lives out at the end of the Flats Road on her father’s fox farm. When she begins spending more time in town, she is surrounded by women—her mother, her mother’s boarder, and her best friend, Naomi. Through these unwitting mentors and in her own encounters with sex, birth, and death, Del explores the dark and bright sides of womanhood.

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Mining the silences and dark discretions of provincial life, these eight tales lay bare the seamless connections and shared guilt that bind even the loneliest of individuals. A stroke victim exposes his deepest secret to a young bride. A daughter confronts her father with the open secret of his life. And in the riveting title story, a selfless nurse tending a dying patient discovers the social utility of lies.

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In these piercingly lovely and endlessly surprising stories by one of the most acclaimed current practitioners of the art of fiction, many things happen: There are betrayals and reconciliations, love affairs consummated and mourned. But the true events in
The Moons of Jupiter
are the ways in which the characters are transformed over time, coming to view their past selves with anger, regret, and infinite compassion that communicate to us with electrifying force.

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In
Open Secrets
, Alice Munro evokes the devastating power of old love suddenly recollected. She tells of vanished young schoolgirls and indentured frontier brides, an eccentric recluse who finds love at a dinner party, and a Canadian woman fleeing a husband and a lover. These stories resonate with sorrow, humor, and wisdom, confirming Munro as one of the most gifted writers of our time.

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A divorced woman returns to her childhood home and confronts the memory of her parents’ confounding yet deep bond. The accidental near-drowning of a child exposes the fragility of the trust between children and parents. A man brings his lover on a visit to his ex-wife, only to feel unexpectedly closer to his estranged partner. With stunning ease and insight, Alice Munro explores the most intimate and transforming moments of human experience.

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In this stunning collection, Alice Munro locates the moments of love and betrayal, desire and forgiveness that change lives forever. A traveling salesman during the Depression takes his children with him on an impromptu visit to a former girlfriend. A poor girl steels herself to marry a rich fiancé she can’t quite manage to love. An abandoned woman tries to choose between the opposing pleasures of seduction and solitude.

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Authors available in this series

Martin Amis
James Baldwin
Sandra Cisneros
Joan Didion
Richard Ford
Langston Hughes
Barry Lopez
Alice Munro
Haruki Murakami
Vladimir Nabokov
V. S. Naipaul
Oliver Sacks

Representing a wide spectrum of some of our most significant
modern authors, the Vintage Readers offer an attractive
,
accessible selection of writing that matters
.