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Book Cover for: Open Secrets: Stories, Alice Munro

Open Secrets: Stories

Alice Munro

These are stories in which women are central. They are about lovers found and lovers lost but lodged still in the subconscious, about secrets that change lives, about people whose histories are opening out or coming to an end. Their power accumulates layer by layer as time and reality shift, identities become uncertain, truths surface. A heart patient on a trip to her doctor on a hot summer's day has a revelation about the lasting power of an old love. A long-hidden secret sticks in the consciousness of a young woman, who, in an outrageous but entirely satisfying act, finally rids herself of its thrall. A romantic tale of capture and escape in the wilds of central Europe may or may not be true, but it comforts the hearer who, on an adventure of her own, is fleeing her hushand. Two childhood friends resolve their lives in a madcap and unexpected way on a memorable midsummer's eve. A pioneer woman homesteading in the Canadian wilderness with her new husband and his brother devises a clever stratagem for eluding the certain and dire fate that awaits her if she remains on the farm.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Vintage
  • Publish Date: Nov 7th, 1995
  • Pages: 304
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.37in - 4.87in - 0.64in - 0.49lb
  • EAN: 9780679755623
  • Categories: Anthologies (multiple authors)Short Stories (single author)Psychological

About the Author

Alice Munro is the author of thirteen collections of stories--including Dear Life, Runaway, and Too Much Happiness--as well as a novel, Lives of Girls and Women. Among the many awards and prizes she received are three Governor General's Literary Awards and two Giller Prizes in Canada; the Rea Award; the Lannan Literary Award; the National Book Critics Circle Award; and the International Booker Prize. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Alice Munro died in 2024.

Praise for this book

"She is our Chekhov, and is going to outlast most of her contemporaries."
-Cynthia Ozick

"Brilliant at evoking life's diversity and unpredictability, [Alice Munro is] an unrivalled chronicler of human nature."
-The Sunday Times

"An Alice Munro story zooms effortlessly through time zones, spans generations and offers up more detail and description than do many full-length contemporary novels."
-Maclean's

"She is the best fiction writer in North America."
-The Vancouver Sun

Praise from fellow writers:

"Her work felt revolutionary when I came to it, and it still does." --Jhumpa Lahiri

"She is one of the handful of writers, some living, most dead, whom I have in mind when I say that fiction is my religion." --Jonthan Franzen

"The authority she brings to the page is just lovely." --Elizabeth Strout

"She's the most savage writer I've ever read, also the most tender, the most honest, the most perceptive." --Jeffery Eugenides

"Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can."--Julian Barnes

"She is a short-story writer who...reimagined what a story can do." --Loorie Moore

"There's probably no one alive who's better at the craft of the short story." --Jim Shepard

"A true master of the form." --Salman Rushdie

"A wonderful writer." --Joyce Carol Oates