The incomparable Alice Munro

Alice Munro is one of the most acclaimed and beloved writers of our time. The New York Times has said, “It has become practically de rigueur to refer to Munro as ‘our Chekhov’… But at this point in Munro’s career, how much can it add? What is certain is this: She is our Munro. And how fortunate we are to call her that.”

Munro is the author of fifteen previous books, including Too Much Happiness, The View from Castle Rock, Runaway, The Progress of Love, and Lives of Girls and Women. She is the recipient of awards too numerous to count, including three Governor General’s Literary Awards and two Giller Prizes, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN / Malamud Award in the U.S. Munro became the first Canadian to win the prestigious Man Booker International Prize for Lifetime Achievement. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages.

The publication of a new book by Alice Munro is an international literary event. In her brilliantly crafted new collection, Dear Life, Munro is writing at the height of her powers.

While most of the stories in Dear Life take place in Munro’s home territory-around Lake Huron-the characters sometimes venture to the cities, and the book’s final stories are set near where she grew up, and in the time of her own childhood, and are in her own words “autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact.”

Her peerless ability to give us the essence of a life in often brief but always spacious and timeless stories is once again everywhere apparent. With breathtaking precision and grace, she illumines the moment a life is forever altered by a chance encounter or an action not taken, or by a simple twist of fate that turns a person out of his or her accustomed path and into a new way of being or thinking.

You can win one of five copies of Dear Life by entering the contest at www.retreatbyrandomhouse.com

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