Away from Her

“No one working today can write more convincingly about ‘the progress of love’ than Alice Munro.”

—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Alice Munro is the living writer most likely to be read in a hundred years.… Her genius, like Chekhov’s, is quiet and particularly hard to describe, because it has the simplicity of the best naturalism, in that it seems not translated from life, but, rather, like life itself.”

—Mona Simpson, The New Republic

“Munro’s stories are composed with a clarity and economy that make novel-writing look downright superfluous and self-indulgent.”

—A. O. Scott, The New York Times Book Review

“[Munro’s] writing never loses its juice, never goes brittle; it also never equivocates or blinks, but simply lets observations speak for themselves.”

—Lorrie Moore, The Atlantic Monthly

“Alice Munro spins tales that show us, again and again, and with wondrous grace, how much can be done in a simple short story.”

—Pico Iyer, Time

“It has been remarked that there is almost always something open-ended, unexplained, or incomplete in Munro’s work. But this deliberate refusal to weave in all the loose threads makes her stories seem more authentic, since this is what real life is like.”

—Alison Lurie, The New York Review of Books

“Munro is the illusionist whose trick can never be exposed. And that is because there is no smoke, there are no mirrors. Munro really does know magic: how to summon the spirits and the emotions that animate our lives.”

—The Washington Post

“In Munro’s hands, a short story is more than big enough to hold the world—and to astonish us, again and again, with the choices forced upon the human heart.”

—Chicago Tribune

“Nothing in a Munro story ever feels contrived…. [She] sings, and her women are heroic. They endure the lives produced by their choices and the fates, and they endure in the mind of the reader.”

—The Boston Globe

“From a markedly finite number of essential components, Munro rather miraculously spins out countless permuta tions of desire and despair, attenuated hopes and cloud bursts of epiphany.”

—The Village Voice