Tackling a variety of themes, such as love, loss, and redemption, author Alice Munro delivers a masterfully crafted collection of short stories. In the title story, Too Much Love, Sonia Kovalevsky, a Russian bohemian, embarks on a winter-long journey across Europe with her love, discovering that love and monogamy are exactly the perfect match.

"A man recalls his father's advice on how to save a drowning person, but struggles to come to terms with its application. Locked down with his new partner and her aging cat, a recovering alcoholic must continue learning how to balance control and vulnerability. When his husband dies, a son's request of his conservative father teaches both men to see one another, and their relationship, anew. In stories about love and fear, Romantic idealism and practical...

In eight “riveting [and] lovely” (San Francisco Chronicle) stories, Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro stunningly explores the strange, often comical desires of the human heart.
 
“Superb . . . dazzling . . . Munro’s feel for her own characters is as pure as Chekhov’s.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)

“Munro is...

The characters in Bad Things Happen - professors, janitors, webcam models, small-time criminals - are between things. Between jobs and marriages, states of sobriety, joy and anguish; between who they are and who they want to be. Kris Bertin's debut introduces us to people at the tenuous moment before everything in their lives change, for better or worse.

"Kara Davis is a girl caught in the middle--of her Canadian nationality and her desire to be a "true" Jamaican, of her mother and grandmother's rages and life lessons, of having to avoid being thought of as too "faas" or too "quiet" or too "bold" or too "soft." Set in "Little Jamaica," Toronto's Eglinton West neighbourhood, Kara moves from girlhood to the threshold of adulthood, from elementary school to high school graduation, in these twelve interconnected...

Presents a selection of the best works of short fiction of the past year from a variety of acclaimed sources.

"Powerful stories of "Metis futurism" that envision a world without violence, capitalism, or colonization. "Education is the new buffalo" is a metaphor widely used among Indigenous peoples in Canada to signify the importance of education to their survival and ability to support themselves, as once Plains nations supported themselves as buffalo peoples. The assumption is that many of the pre-Contact ways of living are forever gone, so adaptation is...

Twenty of the best American short stories of 2011, chosen by the New York Times bestselling author of The Secret Chord. The twenty tightly crafted stories collected here by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Geraldine Brooks are full of deftly drawn characters, universal truths, and often surprising humor. Richard Powers's "To the Measures Fall" is a comic meditation on the uses of literature in the course of a life. In the satirical "The Sleep,"...

Twenty-eight stories set in farms and small towns around Lake Huron. They include Dance of the Happy Shades, on a retired piano teacher, and Walker Brothers Cowboy, on two children making calls with their salesman father during the 1930s depression.

"Home is where we love, suffer, and learn. Some homes we chose, others are inflicted upon us, and still others are bodies we are born into. In this astounding collection of stories, human and more-than-human worlds come together in places we call home. Four sisters and their mother explore their fears while teeny ghost people dress up in fragments of their children's clothes. A somewhat-ghost tends the family garden. Deep in the mountains, a shapeshifting...