num_pages: 620
description: From the winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literatureand one of our most beloved writersa new selection of her peerless short fiction gathered from the collections of the last two decades a companion volume to Selected Stories (1968-1994).Family Furnishings brings us twenty-four of Alice Munros most accomplished most powerfully affecting stories many of them set in the territory she has so brilliantly made her own: the small towns and flatlands of southwestern Ontario. Subtly honed with her hallmark precision grace and compassion these stories illuminate the quotidian yet extraordinary particularity in the lives of men and women parents and children friends and lovers as they discover sex fall in love part quarrel suffer defeat set off into the unknown or find a way to be in the world.Peopled with characters as real to us as we are to ourselves Munros stories encompass the fullness of human experiencefrom the wild exhilaration of first love in Passion to the lengths a once-straying husband will go to make his wife happy as her memory fades in The Bear Came Over the Mountain. Other stories suggest the punishing consequences of leaving home (Runaway) or leaving a marriage (The Children Stay). The part romantic love plays in ones existence is explored in Too Much Happiness based on the life of the noted nineteenth-century mathematician Sophia Kovalevsky. And in stories that Munro has described as closer to the truth than usualDear Life Working for a Living and Home among themwe glimpse the authors own life.As the Nobel Prize presentation speech says in part: Reading one of Alice Munros texts is like watching a cat walk across a laid dinner table. A brief short story can often cover decades summarizing a life as she moves deftly between different periods. No wonder Alice Munro is often able to say more in thirty pages than an ordinary novelist is capable of in three hundred. She is a virtuoso of the elliptical and the master of the contemporary short story.
language: English
title: Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014
publisher: Knopf