Carried Away: A Personal Selection of Stories; Introduction by Margaret Atwood

Munro is one of the best short story writers around and this volume has a lot of her best work.

Using spare sentences and stark settings, Alice Munro covers in one short story a novel's worth of human experience. Each word is pregnant with nuance and meaning, as if she spent all of her time paring down her work until only the most esstential and core words remained. Even though the themes of her stories are permutations, read each story one at a time, appreciating it like the gem that it is. I will definitely read more of her work.

I have come to the fiction of Alice Munro late. She has been producing extraordinary short stories set in Ontario, Cananda mostly for decades. And she captures a working-class world for me that speaks to my own roots. The stories are about people first and I expect place secondly, but her sense of the culture and social stratification are so accurate they make me remember and realize. Her sense of detail and dialogue are also accurate and winning. I give this big compendium 5 stars, and recommend her to all.

These stories were purportedly selected by Alice Munro herself. Well, I guess Alice needs to make a living, too, as well as writing masterpiece after masterpiece. However, every story in the selection draws meaning and resonance from its original context in the suite of stories from which it was extracted. If you've never read Munro, I'd suggest getting the early collection Moons of Jupiter. If you're not blown away by that book, you wouldn't be "carried away" by the Everyman's Library selection either. On the other hand, if you are astonished by the emotional subtlety of the Moons, then you'll want to buy and read the other ten story-books as well!