Alice Munro has been repeatedly hailed as one of our greatest living writers, a reputation that just keeps growing. Often compared to Chekhov, Munro enables readers both to see clearly the details of daily life and to see beyond them, to the human riches that lie beneath. 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. Her stories appear frequently in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Paris Review.
We will discuss a selection of stories across her distinguished career; favorites selected by Munro herself and gathered together in Carried Away. Whether she is describing a woman writer struggling with her father's attitude toward her, in "The Moons of Jupiter," or the metamorphosis a librarian's life undergoes over decades, in "Carried Away," Munro excels at creating characters whose often surprising decisions are powerfully moving. In deceptively simple prose, Munro takes us into the lives of characters at all stages of life, from childhood to old age and the landscapes through which they move.
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