Carried Away

Excerpted from the Introduction


Alice Munro is among the major writers of English fiction of our time. She s been accorded armfuls of super-superlatives by critics in both North America and the United Kingdom, she s won many awards, and she has a devoted international readership. Among writers themselves, her name is spoken in hushed tones. Most recently she s been used as a stick to flog the enemy with, in various inter-writerly combats. You call this writing? the floggers say, in effect. Alice Munro! Now that s writing! She s the kind of writer about whom it is often said no matter how well-known she becomes that she ought to be better known.

None of this happened overnight. Alice Munro has been writing since the 1960s, and her first collection Dance of the Happy Shades appeared in 1968. To date and including her latest, the rapturously-received Runaway (2004) she has published ten collections, averaging nine or ten stories each. Though her fiction has been a regular feature of The New Yorker since the 1970s, her recent elevation to international literary sainthood took as long as it did partly because of the form in which she writes. She is a writer of stories short stories, as they used to be called, or short fiction, which is now  more common.

Though many American and British and Canadian writers of the first rank have practised this form, there is still a widespread but false tendency to equate length with importance. Thus Alice Munro has been among those writers subject to periodic rediscovery, at least outside Canada. It s as if she jumps out of a cake Surprise! and then has to jump out of it again, and then again. Readers don t see her name in lights on every billboard. They come across her as if by accident or fate, and are drawn in, and then there is an outbreak of wonder and excitement, and incredulity Where did Alice Munro come from? Why didn t anybody tell me? How can such excellence have sprung from nowhere?


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But Alice

Introduction by Margaret Atwood
Select Bibliography
Chronology

Royal Beatings
The Beggar Maid
The Turkey Season
The Moons of Jupiter
The Progress of Love
Miles City, Montana
Friend of My Youth
Meneseteung
Differently
Carried Away
The Albanian Virgin
A Wilderness Station
Vandals
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
Save the Reaper
Runaway
The Bear Came Over the Mountain

Alice Munro is the author of thirteen collections of stories including Dear Life, Runaway, and Too Much Happiness as well as a novel, Lives of Girls and Women. Among the many awards and prizes she 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 International Booker Prize. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Alice Munro died in 2024.

Munro stands as one of the living colossi of the modern short story, and her Chekhovian realism, her keen psychological insight, her instinctive feel for the emotional arithmetic of domestic life have indelibly stamped contemporary writing. The New York Times

In Alice Munro s hands, the smallest moments contain the central truths of a lifetime. Maclean s

Alice Munro has a strong claim to being the best fiction writer now working in North America. The New York Times Book Review

Captivating . . . Munro does what most writers dream of doing and succeeds at it, page after page, story after story, collection after collection. The Oregonian

From a markedly finite number of essential components, Munro rather miraculously spins out countless permutations of desire and despair, attenuated hopes and cloudbursts of epiphany. . . . Every one of these women is different, and that is the wonder of Alice Munro. The Village Voice

Alice Munro is among the major writers of English fiction of our time . . . In Munro s work, grace abounds, but it is strangely disguised: nothing can be predicted. Emotions erupt. Preconceptions crumble. Surprises proliferate. Astonishments leap out. Malicious acts can have positive consequences. Salvation arrives when least expected, and in peculiar forms. from the Introduction by Margaret Atwood