Selected Stories

Covering the first half of Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro's career, these are some of the best, most touching and powerful short stories ever written This first-ever selection of Alice Munro's stories sums up her genius. Her territory is the secrets that cackle beneath the façade of everyday lives, the pain and promises, loves and fears of apparently ordinary men and women whom she renders extraordinary and unforgettable. This volume brings together the best of Munro's stories, from 1968 through to 1994. The second selected volume of her stories, 1995-2009 is also published by Vintage Classics.

In her lengthy and fascinating introduction Margaret Atwood says “Alice Munro is among the major writers of English fiction of our time. . . . Among writers themselves, her name is spoken in hushed tones.” This splendid gift edition is sure to delight Alice Munro’s growing body of admirers, what Atwood calls her “devoted international readership.” Long-time fans of her stories will enjoy meeting old favourites, where their new setting in this book may reveal new sides to what once seemed a familiar story; devoted followers may even dispute the exclusion of a specially-beloved story. Readers lucky enough to have found her recently will be delighted, as one masterpiece succeeds another. The 17 stories are carefully arranged in the order in which she wrote them, which allows us to follow the development of her range. “A Wilderness Station,” for example, breaks “short story rules” by taking us right back to the 1830s then jumping forward more than 100 years. “The Albanian Virgin” destroys the idea that her stories are set in B.C. or in Ontario’s “Alice Munro Country.” And “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” the story behind the film Away From Her, takes us far from the world of young girls learning about sex into unflinching old age. This is a book to read slowly, savouring each story. It deserves a place in every Canadian book-lover’s library.

Includes the stories that inspired the movies Total Recall, Screamers, Minority Report, Paycheck, and Next “More than anyone else in the field, Mr. Dick really puts you inside people’s minds.” —The Wall Street Journal The Philip K. Dick Reader Many thousands of readers consider Philip K. Dick the greatest science fiction mind on any planet. Since his untimely death in 1982, interest in Dick’s works has continued to mount, and his reputation has been further enhanced by a growing body of critical attention. The Philip K. Dick Award is now given annually to a distinguished work of science fiction, and the Philip K. Dick Society is devoted to the study and promulgation of his works. Dick won the prestigious Hugo Award for the best novel of 1963 for The Man in the High Castle. In the last year of his life, the film Blade Runner was made from his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? This collection includes some of Dick’s earliest short and medium-length fiction, including We Can Remember It for You Wholesale (the story that inspired the motion picture Total Recall), Second Variety (which inspired the motion picture Screamers), Paycheck, The Minority Report, and twenty more.

In her preface to Robert Walser's Selected Stories, Susan Sontag describes Walser as "a good-humored, sweet Beckett." The more common comparison is to "a comic Kafka." Both formulations effectively describe the reading experience in these stories: the reader is obviously in the presence of a mind-bending genius, but one characterized by a wry, buoyant voice, as apparently cheerful as it is disturbing. Walser is one of the twentieth century's great modern masters—revered by everyone from Walter Benjamin to Hermann Hesse to W. G. Sebald—and Selected Stories gives the fullest display of his talent. "He is most at home in the mode of short fiction," according to J. M. Coetzee in The New York Review of Books. The stories "show him at his dazzling best."

The nine stories and one poem collected in this volume formed the basis for the astonishingly original film “Short Cuts” directed by Robert Altman. Collected altogether in this volume, these stories form a searing and indelible portrait of American innocence and loss. From the collections Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, Where I’m Calling From, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and A New Path to the Waterfall; including an introduction by Robert Altman. With deadpan humor and enormous tenderness, this is the work of “one of the true contemporary masters” (The New York Review of Books).

A marvelous collection from "the greatest living writer of short stories in the English language" (The New Yorker). Four-time winner of the O. Henry Prize, three-time winner of the Whitbread Prize, and five-time finalist for the Man Booker Prize, William Trevor is one of the most acclaimed authors of our time. Over a career spanning more than half a century, Trevor has crafted exquisitely rendered tales that brilliantly illuminate the human condition. Bringing together forty-eight stories from After Rain, The Hill Bachelors, A Bit on the Side, and Cheating at Canasta, this second volume of Trevor's collected fiction offers readers "treasures of gorgeous writing, brilliant dialogue, and unforgettable lives" (The New York Times Book Review).

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This collection brings together twenty-one of Lardner’s best pieces, including the six Jack Keefe stories that comprise You Know Me, Al, as well as such familiar favorites as “Alibi Ike,” “Some Like Them Cold,” and “Guillible’s Travels.” For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.