A Wilderness Station - (Vintage International) by Alice Munro (Paperback)

About the Book

"Originally published as Selected stories."

Book Synopsis

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE - A "luminous" (Vogue) collection of twenty-eight stories from Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro, "one of the finest contemporary story writers in the English language" (Newsday)--previously published as Selected Stories

"Her stories are like few others. One must go back to Tolstoy and Chekhov . . . for comparable largeness."--John Updike, The New York Times Book Review

Spanning almost thirty years and settings that range from big cities to small towns and farmsteads of rural Canada, this magnificent collection brings together twenty-eight stories "about love, marriage, discontent, divorce, betrayal, impulsive passion, second thoughts, deaths, even murder--stories with plenty of drama and surprise as well as reflection and meditation" (The Wall Street Journal)--by a writer of unparalleled wit, generosity, and emotional power. In A Wilderness Station: Selected Stories, 1968-1994, Alice Munro makes lives that seem small unfold until they are revealed to be as spacious as prairies and locates the moments that change those 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.

To read these stories is to succumb to the spell of a true narrative sorcerer, a writer who enchants her readers utterly even as she restores them to their truest selves.

Review Quotes

"Heart-stopping, utterly beautiful. . . . One of the finest contemporary story writers in the English language."--Newsday

"She has quietly emerged as one of our greatest living writers. . . . Munro has an unerring talent for uncovering the extraordinary in the ordinary."--Newsweek

"Her stories are like few others. One must go back to Tolstoy and Chekhov . . . for comparable largeness."--John Updike, The New York Times Book Review

"Makes one believe anew in fiction's power to transfigure."--The Washington Post

"A wonderful sampling of vintage Munro. . . . For those who have never read her, there is no better place to begin. And for those long familiar with her writing, there remain surprises and rediscoveries."--San Francisco Chronicle

"She seeks to evoke the mysteries of real life and she succeeds brilliantly."--Los Angeles Times

"[A] literary sensation . . . told with such perfect pitch that the results are stunning."--USA Today

"Meaty stories about love, marriage, discontent, divorce, betrayal, impulsive passion, second thoughts, deaths, even murder--stories with plenty of drama and surprise as well as reflection and meditation."--The Wall Street Journal

"An entire world caught in the amber of memory. [The stories] have a quality of folk art about them--its patient amplitude, sly humor, and hard materiality."--Village Voice

"A rare pleasure . . . rich and complex . . . an excellent one-volume introduction to her work."--Boston Book Review

"Luminous . . . Munro's stories ride on tone and feeling: Merely summarizing one is like describing a villa by holding up its doorbell."--Vogue

About the Author

ALICE MUNRO grew up in Wingham, Ontario and attended the University of Western Ontario (now Western University), studying journalism and English. Her first collection of stories was published in 1968 as Dance of the Happy Shades, which garnered much acclaim and won the Governor General's Award for English fiction that year. Three years later, she published her only novel, Lives of Girls and Women. Over the next few decades, she published many more short story collections, including Who Do You Think You Are?; The Moons of Jupiter; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, from which a story was later adapted into the two-time Academy Award-winning movie, Away from Her; Runaway; and The View from Castle Rock. Her stories appeared regularly in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review.

In 1978 Munro received her second Governor General's Award for Who Do You Think You Are? and her third in 1986 with The Progress of Love. In 2009 she won the Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work. Her final story collection, Dear Life, came in 2012, and the next year, the same year she retired from writing, she won the Nobel Prize in Literature, hailed as the "master of the contemporary short story." Munro has also been the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the W.H. Smith Award, two Giller Prizes, several Trillium Prizes, the Jubilee Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best Book Award, among many others.