艾莉絲.孟若(Alice Munro)被譽為加拿大當代最傑出的短篇小說家,2009年擊敗奈波爾與喬伊斯.卡洛.奧茲等人,榮獲第三屆布克國際文學獎(Man Booker International Prize)。布克國際文學獎每兩年頒發一次,此獎候選人不分國籍,入選資格以曾發表英文作品的作家為主,第一、二屆得主分別為阿爾巴尼亞作家伊斯梅爾.卡達萊(Ismail Kadare)和尼日利亞作家齊努亞.阿奇貝(Chinua Achebe)。
WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE(R) IN LITERATURE 2013
Carried Away is a dazzling selection of stories-seventeen favorites chosen by the author from across her distinguished career. With an Introduction by Margaret Atwood.
Alice Munro has been repeatedly hailed as one of our greatest living writers, a reputation that has been growing for years. The stories brought together here span a quarter century, drawn from some of her earliest books, The Beggar Maid and The Moons of Jupiter, through her recent best-selling collection, Runaway.
Here are such favorites as "Royal Beatings" in which a young girl, her father, and stepmother release the tension of their circumstances in a ritual of punishment and reconciliation; "Friend of My Youth" in which a woman comes to understand that her difficult mother is not so very different from herself; and "The Albanian Virgin," a romantic tale of capture and escape in Central Europe that may or may not be true but that nevertheless comforts the hearer, who is on a desperate adventure of her own.
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. Like the World War I soldier in the title story, whose letters from the front to a small-town librarian he doesn’t know change her life forever, Munro’s unassuming characters insinuate themselves in our hearts and take permanent hold.