Carried Away

　　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)。

　　Carried Away is a dazzling selection of stories–seventeen favorites chosen by the author from across her distinguished career.

　　Alice Munro has been repeatedly hailed as one of our greatest living writers, a reputation that has been growing for years. The stories brought together here span a quarter century, drawn from some of her earliest books, The Beggar Maid and The Moons of Jupiter, through her recent best-selling collection, Runaway.

　　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 Love of a Good Woman,” in which, when an old crime resurfaces, a woman has to choose whether to believe in the man she intends to marry.

　　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 eleven new collections of stories-Dance of the Happy Shades; Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You; The Beggar Maid; The Moons of Jupiter; The Progress of Love; Friend of My Youth; Open Secrets; The Love of a Good Woman; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage; Runaway; and a volume of Selected 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 the Man Booker International Prize, 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 United States' National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Edward MacDowell Medal in literature. 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.