A New York Times Editors’ Choice Book
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 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 of love and betrayal, desire and forgiveness, 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.
“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." —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
"The collection of the year. Ήere,' as Dryden said of Chaucer, 'is God's plenty." —Kirkus Reviews
