With her peerless ability to give us the essence of a life in often brief but spacious and timeless stories, Alice Munro illumines the moment a life is shaped -- the moment a dream, or sex, or perhaps a simple twist of fate turns a person out of his or her accustomed path and into another way of being. Suffused with Munro's clarity of vision and her unparalleled gift for storytelling, these stories (set in the world Munro has made her own: the countryside and towns around Lake Huron) about departures and beginnings, accidents, dangers, and homecomings both virtual and real, paint a vivid and lasting portrait of how strange, dangerous, and extraordinary the ordinary life can be.

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"It has become practically de rigeur to refer to Munro as 'our Chekhov'... But at this point in Munro's career, how much can it add? What is certain is this: She is our Munro. And how fortunate we are to call her that." -- New York Times Book Review

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ALICE MUNRO is the author of twelve collections of stories -- the most recent of which are Runaway, The View From Castle Rock, and Too Much Happiness -- as well as a novel, Lives of Girls and Women, and Selected Stories. Among the many awards and prizes she has received are: three Governor General's Literary Awards and two Giller Prizes in Canada; the Rea Award, the Lannan Literary Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Man Booker International Prize, Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. The author lives in Clinton, Ontario.

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