Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014

Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014

From the winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literatureâ€”and one of our most beloved writersâ€”a new selection of her peerless short fiction, gathered from the collections of the last two decades, a companion volume to Selected Stories (1968-1994).

Family Furnishings brings us twenty-four of Alice Munroâ€™s most accomplished, most powerfully affecting stories, many of them set in the territory she 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 of 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 ourselves, Munroâ€™s stories encompass the fullness of humanÂ experienceâ€”from theÂ wild exhilaration of first love, in â€œPassion,â€ to the lengths a once-straying husband will go to make his wife happy as her memory fades, in â€œThe Bear Came Over the Mountain.â€ Other stories suggest the punishing consequences ofÂ leaving home (â€œRunawayâ€) or leaving a marriage (â€œThe Children Stayâ€). The part romantic love plays in oneâ€™s existence is explored in â€œToo Much Happiness,â€ based on the life of the noted nineteenth-century mathematician, Sophia Kovalevsky. And in stories that Munro has described as â€œcloser to the truth than usualâ€â€”â€œDear Life,â€ â€œWorking for a Living,â€ and â€œHomeâ€ among themâ€”we glimpse the authorâ€™s own life.

As the Nobel Prize presentation speech says in part: â€œReading one of Alice Munroâ€™s texts is like watching a cat walk across a laid dinner table. A brief short story can often cover decades, summarizing a life, as she moves deftly between different periods. No wonder Alice Munro is often able to say more in thirty pages than an ordinary novelist is capable of in three hundred. She is a virtuoso of the elliptical and the master of the contemporary short story.â€
Country USA
Brand Knopf
Manufacturer Knopf
Binding Hardcover
ItemPartNumber 9781101874103
ReleaseDate 2014-11-11
UnitCount 1
Format Deckle Edge
EANs 9781101874103

Country	USA
Brand	Knopf
Manufacturer	Knopf
Binding	Hardcover
ItemPartNumber	9781101874103
ReleaseDate	2014-11-11
UnitCount	1
Format	Deckle Edge
EANs	9781101874103

Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014

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