Carried Away: A Personal Selection of Stories

　　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)。

A dazzling selection of seventeen stories from Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro--featuring an Introduction by Margaret Atwood

＂Munro stands as one of the living colossi of the modern short story, and her Chekhovian realism, her keen psychological insight, her instinctive feel for the emotional arithmetic of domestic life have indelibly stamped contemporary writing.＂--The New York Times

The stories brought together in Carried Away span a quarter century, drawn from Alice Munro’s earlier works. 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.

作者簡介

艾莉絲．孟若(Alice Munro)

　　在加拿大安大略省的溫文鎮長大，進過西安大略省大學。已出版的短篇小說集包括《出走》、《感情遊戲》、《快樂色調之舞》、《我一直想告訴你的一件事》、《乞丐女僕》、《木星的月亮》、《愛情進展》、《我年輕時的朋友》、《公開的秘密》、她的《短篇選集》和《一位好女子的愛》，再加上長篇小說《女孩和女人的生活》。在傑出的寫作生涯中得過許多國際文學獎，包括加拿大的總督總文學獎和格勒爾獎(Giller Prize)，和美國國家書獎的書評人獎，2009年並榮獲第三屆布克國際文學獎(Man Booker International Prize)。

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, and two volumes of Selected Stories. During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including three of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards and two of its Giller Prizes, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Lannan Literary Award, England’s W. H. Smith Book Award, 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. She lives in Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron.