Away From Her by Alice Munro

Acclaim for Alice Munro
“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

Away from Her
    Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published more than ten 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 and prizes, including three of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards and its Giller Prize, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Lannan Literary Award, the W. H. Smith Literary Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker , The Atlantic Monthly , The Paris Review , and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. Alice Munro and her husband divide their time between Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron, and Comox, British Columbia.

ALSO BY ALICE MUNRO
The View From Castle Rock
Runaway
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
The Love of a Good Woman
Selected Stories
Open Secrets
Friend of My Youth
The Progress of Love
The Moons of Jupiter
The Beggar Maid
Something I’ve Been Meaning To Tell You
Lives of Girls and Women
Dance of the Happy Shades



Preface
    Every now and then, a piece of writing enters your life and collects seemingly unrelated threads, tangling some of them together, straightening out a few, until an articulate pattern is embroidered. One you could have never made yourself.
    “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” entered my life when I was twenty-one years old. It crept right into me, had its way with me, and shifted my direction in ways I didn’t understand until years later. I am not an academic, nor a writer (I don’t consider the adaptation of other people’s stories serious writing), so I feel ill equipped to complete the task ofwriting this preface other than from