WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE® IN LITERATURE 2013
A Best Book of the Year: San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“If there’s literary pleasure greater than reading Alice Munro, it must be rereading Alice Munro.” —The Seattle Times
Here is a selection of Munro’s most accomplished and powerfully affecting short fiction from the last two decades, a companion volume to A Wilderness Station: Selected Stories, 1968–1994. These stories encompass the fullness of human experience, from the wild exhilaration of first love (in “Passion”) to the punishing consequences of leaving home (“Runaway”) or ending a marriage (“The Children Stay”). And in stories that Munro has described as “closer to the truth than usual”—”Dear Life,” “Working for a Living,” and “Home”—we glimpse the author’s own life.
Subtly honed with her hallmark precision, grace, and compassion, these stories illuminate the quotidian yet astonishing particularities 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.
“What a stunning, subtle and sympathetic explorer of the heart Munro is.” —The Washington Post
“Generations to come will relish and study Family Furnishings. . . . A superb introduction for those new to her work, and a reminder to longtime fans that Munro is a writer to be cherished.” —NPR
“Brilliant. . . . In the simplest of words, and with the greatest of power, she makes us see and hear an ‘unremarkable’ scene we will never forget.” —The New York Review of Books
“Turn to just about any page and you’ll discover a brilliant insight into human behavior. . . . Family Furnishings reminds us that Munro is our greatest contemporary short story writer.” —USA Today
“[An] extraordinary collection. . . . Munro seems to have gotten hold of our own darkest feelings about the people in our lives and transformed them, gloriously, into art.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“The preeminent short-fiction writer of her time. . . . Astonishing. . . . Stunning. . . . Remind[s] us that fiction, at its most profound and moving, is about human endurance, which makes it very much a reflection of reality.” —Los Angeles Times
“Her work felt revolutionary when I came to it, and it still does.” —Jhumpa Lahiri
“She is one of the handful of writers, some living, most dead, whom I have in mind when I say that fiction is my religion.” —Jonathan Franzen
“The authority she brings to the page is just lovely.” —Elizabeth Strout
“She’s the most savage writer I’ve ever read, also the most tender, the most honest, the most perceptive.” —Jeffery Eugenides
“Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.”—Julian Barnes
“A wonderful writer.” —Joyce Carol Oates
