Carried Away: A Personal Selection of Stories

Carried Away is a dazzling selection of stories–seventeen favorites chosen by the author from across her distinguished career.Alice Munro has been repeatedly hailed as one of our greatest living writers, a reputation that has been growing for years. The stories brought together here span a quarter century, drawn from some of her earliest books, The Beggar Maid and The Moons of Jupiter, through her recent best-selling collection, Runaway. Here are such favorites as “Royal Beatings” in which a young girl, her father, and stepmother release the tension of their circumstances in a ritual of punishment and reconciliation; “Friend of My Youth” in which a woman comes to understand that her difficult mother is not so very different from herself; and “The Albanian Virgin,” a romantic tale of capture and escape in Central Europe that may or may not be true, told by an elderly married woman to her younger friend who is on a desperate adventure of her own..Munro’s incomparable empathy for her characters, the depth of her understanding of human nature, and the grace and surprise of her narrative add up to a richly layered and capacious fiction. Like the World War I soldier in the title story, whose letters from the front to a small-town librarian he doesn’t know change her life forever, Munro’s unassuming characters insinuate themselves in our hearts and take permanent hold.

Carried Away, Alice Munro’s Best and My Best Stories contain the same 17 works: 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.