"Too many things," a creative writing instructor tells the narrator of "Differently." "Too many things going on at the same time; also too many people. Think, he told her. What is the important thing? What do you want us to pay attention to? Think." What does Alice Munro want us to pay attention to in her Selected Stories? Everything, really, and so her narratives loop back on themselves, jump decades backward and forward in time, introduce characters who later drop out of the action, and generally break every rule in the short-story-writing book. In "Carried Away," for instance, a dead character makes a sudden, inexplicable appearance in what is otherwise the thoroughly naturalistic account of a librarian's disappointment with love. "The Albanian Virgin" is two stories in one: the first--the fanciful tale of Ghegs kidnapping a young Canadian woman--is told within the second, about a bookstore owner who has lost her own bearings after a divorce. There are stories that begin with their endings, and several more that end with beginnings; others are told from three or four different angles, each with varying degrees of reliability. Taken together, they form an intricate web of relationships and connections, falsehood and anecdote, a kind of fictional palimpsest laid over the faint traces of plot.

And yet Munro trusts her readers; she believes that we will pay attention to all these things and more. She aims to create the illusion that everything in her fiction has been left in, and it is this very capaciousness that sets her work apart, making possible the keen psychological insight of her stories about marriage as well as the cool violence of "Vandals" or "Fits." Hers is an unusual sort of realism, technically innovative and amenable--especially in the later work--to loose ends. (It also possesses a quick, flinty wit: "This was the first time I understood how God could become a real opponent, not just some kind of nuisance or large decoration," says the narrator of "The Progress of Love.") To call Munro the Canadian Chekhov is by now a commonplace--and yet she may have done more for the short fiction form than any writer since. These are stories that will be read, savored, and admired hundreds of years from now. --Mary Park


From Publishers Weekly
A literature-lover's feast, this phenomenal collection of 28 short stories, selected from seven collections that span three decades, showcases Munro's mastery of the form, her vibrantly evocative prose and her undiluted, incisive vision of human nature. Almost without exception, the tales are set in western Canada, from the small-town and farm life of the Lake Huron region to the cultivated suburbs of Vancouver. Most take place in earlier decades, starting with the Depression era. One of Munro's great gifts is that she renders her settings both palpably specific?like one small town's "maple trees whose roots have cracked and heaved the sidewalk and spread out like crocodiles into the bare yards"?and universally accessible. In the opening story, "Walker Brothers Cowboy," a young girl accompanies her salesman father on his rounds through rural Canada in the 1930s. A surprise visit to one of his old girlfriends reveals his hidden, fun-loving past, and the girl poignantly weighs her mother's disappointments in marrying her father against this old girlfriend's in losing him. "Material" strikes a very different tone: the narrator, the ex-wife of a reasonably well-known contemporary writer and professor, reads a recent short story of his that, to her surprise, affects her deeply (even though she wryly deconstructs his author bio as filled with "half-lies"). Having doubted that he would ever be a good writer, she is suddenly envious that he can take a lifetime of memories?mere "useless baggage" for her?and create something from them, while she sacrificed her writing ambitions to deal with the mundanities of life. Munro's stories are always trenchant, finely modulated and truly brilliant meditations on peoples' complexities and the emotions they contend with?sometimes ruefully, sometimes in pain, but most often with stoic dignity. 40,000 first printing. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
The collected stories of Canadian author Munro, whose works often appear in The New Yorker, would probably fill several tomes, but this thoughtful selection will satisfy the choosiest readers. From the little girl in "Walker Brothers Cowboy" who dreads her mother's pretentions but loosens up when her down-but-not-out salesman father takes her on walks to Lake Huron; to Miss Marsalles's suffocating piano recitals ("Dance of the Happy Shades") suddenly illuminated when a retarded girl plays real music; to the heroine of "The Albanian Virgin," a Canadian woman who by accident ends up living amidst tribal people outside of Trieste; to "Vandals," a complicated tale of solitude and resentment that closes the book, Munro creates characters and situations that draw one up short. In one brief instant, the laws don't apply, assumptions are smashed, and the reader is left staring giddily down the whirling black hole of the universe. It would have been nice to see these pieces dated so that we could trace Munro's development more easily?the pieces at least appear to be in roughly chronological order?but this is an important book for serious readers everywhere.?Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, John Updike
As well as a spirited, acutely perceptive taleteller, Ms. Munro is an implacable destiny spinner, whose authorial voice breaks into her fiction like that of a God who can no longer bear to keep quiet.


From Booklist
There's nothing quite like a retrospective collection of short stories by a virtuoso of the form: neither novels nor poetry nor memoirs present readers with such richness, such surprise, such twists of fate and quirks of personality. With this gathering of the best of nearly three decades of work, Munro's place in the constellation of short story masters, which includes such kindred spirits as Sherwood Anderson, Flannery O'Connor, and William Maxwell, is affirmed and celebrated. Like her peers, Munro has established a distinctive territory: the country and small towns that hug the shores of Lake Huron. Munro has much bemused and tender affection for this rural, weathered realm, and she populates it with a host of unique and memorable characters, from the determinedly good-natured old piano teacher in the haunting "Dance of the Happy Shades," to Rose, the bold heroine of a trio of exceptionally frank stories, including the fresh and riveting "Wild Swans." In story after story, each so different in content and mood from the next, Munro achieves a consistent and remarkable ease of syntax, delicacy of psychology, and resonance of visual imagery. There is much to savor and treasure here. Donna Seaman


Book Description
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 her Selected Stories, 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. To read these stories--about a traveling salesman and his children on an impromptu journey; an abandoned woman choosing between seduction and solitude--is to succumb to the spell of a writer who enchants her readers utterly even as she restores them to their truest selves.


From the Inside Flap
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 her Selected Stories, 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. To read these stories--about a traveling salesman and his children on an impromptu journey; an abandoned woman choosing between seduction and solitude--is to succumb to the spell of a writer who enchants her readers utterly even as she restores them to their truest selves.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

This generous selection of stories drawn from Alice Munro's seven collections - the work of almost thirty years - is a literary event of the highest order, one that confirms Munro's place in the very front ranks of today's writers of fiction. From the first story, about two children making sales calls with their father during the Depression and turning off the road they're traveling on to visit one of his old girlfriends, we know we've entered the magic of "Alice Munro country" - a world of passionate and often hidden loves, betrayals, family secrets, and unspoken sympathies, a world that encompasses big cities as well as the area of farms, small towns, and resorts around Lake Huron.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

A literature-lover's feast, this phenomenal collection of 28 short stories, selected from seven collections that span three decades, showcases Munro's mastery of the form, her vibrantly evocative prose and her undiluted, incisive vision of human nature. Almost without exception, the tales are set in western Canada, from the small-town and farm life of the Lake Huron region to the cultivated suburbs of Vancouver. Most take place in earlier decades, starting with the Depression era. One of Munro's great gifts is that she renders her settings both palpably specificlike one small town's "maple trees whose roots have cracked and heaved the sidewalk and spread out like crocodiles into the bare yards"and universally accessible. In the opening story, "Walker Brothers Cowboy," a young girl accompanies her salesman father on his rounds through rural Canada in the 1930s. A surprise visit to one of his old girlfriends reveals his hidden, fun-loving past, and the girl poignantly weighs her mother's disappointments in marrying her father against this old girlfriend's in losing him. "Material" strikes a very different tone: the narrator, the ex-wife of a reasonably well-known contemporary writer and professor, reads a recent short story of his that, to her surprise, affects her deeply (even though she wryly deconstructs his author bio as filled with "half-lies"). Having doubted that he would ever be a good writer, she is suddenly envious that he can take a lifetime of memoriesmere "useless baggage" for herand create something from them, while she sacrificed her writing ambitions to deal with the mundanities of life. Munro's stories are always trenchant, finely modulated and truly brilliant meditations on peoples' complexities and the emotions they contend withsometimes ruefully, sometimes in pain, but most often with stoic dignity. 40,000 first printing. (Oct.)

Library Journal