by Alice Munro
The daughter lived not so far away from me for a while in my adult life. I could have written to her, maybe visited. If I had not been so busy with my own young family and my own invariably unsatisfactory writing. But the person I would really have liked to talk to then was my mother, who was no longer available.
—
I DID NOT GO HOME for my mother’s last illness or for her funeral. I had two small children and nobody in Vancouver to leave them with. We could barely have afforded the trip, and my husband had a contempt for formal behavior, but why blame it on him? I felt the same. We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do—we do it all the time.
Bibliographic Note
The stories in this volume appear in roughly chronological sequence of their book publication. We also used the date of the first book publication in the dates of the subtitle, so that the two volumes of selected stories cover Alice Munro’s entire years of publishing books. The stories are listed here in the same order as they appear in the book, with the place and year of first publication following.
“The Love of a Good Woman,” The New Yorker, December 1996
“Jakarta,” Saturday Night (Toronto, Canada), February 1998
“The Children Stay,” The New Yorker, December 1997
“My Mother’s Dream,” The Love of a Good Woman, November 1998
“Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, November 2001
“Family Furnishings,” The New Yorker, July 2001
“Post and Beam,” The New Yorker, December 2000
“The Bear Came over the Mountain,” The New Yorker, December 1999 and January 2000
“Runaway,” The New Yorker, August 2003
“Soon,” The New Yorker, June 2004
“Passion,” The New Yorker, March 2004
“The View from Castle Rock,” The New Yorker, August 2005
“Working for a Living,” Grand Street, 1, no. 1 (1981)
“Hired Girl,” The New Yorker, April 1994
“Home,” New Canadian Short Stories: 74, eds. David Helwig and Joan Harcourt, 1974
“Dimensions,” The New Yorker, June 2006
“Wood,” The New Yorker, November 1980. The revised version was also published in the New Haven Review in 2009
“Child’s Play,” Harper’s Magazine, February 2007
“Too Much Happiness,” Harper’s Magazine, August 2009
“To Reach Japan,” Narrative, Winter 2012
“Amundsen,” The New Yorker, August 2012
“Train,” Harper’s Magazine, April 2012
“The Eye,” Dear Life, November 2012
“Dear Life,” The New Yorker, September 2011.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published thirteen collections of stories as well as a novel, Lives of Girls and Women. During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards, including two Giller Prizes, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Man Booker International Prize. In 2013 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, Granta, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages.
