The View from Castle Rock


Book Description

A “revelatory” (The Boston Globe), “exhilarating” (The New York Times Book Review) collection of twelve stories that “[redraw] the boundaries between fiction and memoir” (O: The Oprah Magazine), from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro “Munro really does know magic: how to summon the spirits and the emotions that animate our lives.”—The Washington Post Book World A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, Slate, Rocky Mountain News, New York, The Kanas City Star A young boy, taken to Edinburgh’s Castle Rock to look across the sea to America, catches a glimpse of his father’s dream. Scottish immigrants experience love and loss on a journey that leads them to rural Ontario. Wives, mothers, fathers, and children move through uncertainty, ambivalence, and contemplation in these stories of hopes, adversity, and wonder. The View from Castle Rock reveals what is most essential in Munro’s art: her compassionate understanding of ordinary lives.




The View From Castle Rock


Book Description

Brilliantly paced, lit with sparks of danger and underlying menace, these are dazzling, provocative stories about Svengali men and the radical women who outmanoeuvre them, about destructive marriages and curdled friendships, about mothers and sons, about moments that change or haunt a life. Alice Munro takes on complex, even harrowing emotions and events, and renders them into stories that surprise, amaze, and shed light on the unpredictable ways we accommodate what happens in our lives. Munro’s unsettling stories turn lives into art, and expand our world and our understanding of the strange workings of the human heart.




Dear Life


Book Description

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE© IN LITERATURE 2013 A New York Times Notable Book A Washington Post Notable Work of Fiction A Best Book of the Year: The Atlantic, NPR, San Francisco Chronicle, Vogue, AV Club In story after story in this brilliant new collection, Alice Munro pinpoints the moment a person is forever altered by a chance encounter, an action not taken, or a simple twist of fate. Her characters are flawed and fully human: a soldier returning from war and avoiding his fiancée, a wealthy woman deciding whether to confront a blackmailer, an adulterous mother and her neglected children, a guilt-ridden father, a young teacher jilted by her employer. Illumined by Munro’s unflinching insight, these lives draw us in with their quiet depth and surprise us with unexpected turns. And while most are set in her signature territory around Lake Huron, some strike even closer to home: an astonishing suite of four autobiographical tales offers an unprecedented glimpse into Munro’s own childhood. Exalted by her clarity of vision and her unparalleled gift for storytelling, Dear Life shows how strange, perilous, and extraordinary ordinary life can be.




The Children of Castle Rock


Book Description

St Trinians and Lauren St John collide in this hilarious and thrilling bestselling adventure from Natasha Farrant! When Alice Mistlethwaite is shipped off to boarding school in Scotland it's nothing like she imagines. Run by the mysterious Major, there are no punishments and the students are more likely to be taught about body painting or extreme survival than maths or English! Then Alice's dad goes missing and she must run away to find him. Can she persuade her new friends to help? So begins an epic quest across wild Scottish highlands and islands, where friendships will be made and broken, lies will be untangled and the children will face danger and excitement at every turn . . . Both hilarious and heartfelt, this is the classic adventure story brought bang up to date, and told in Natasha's inimitable voice. 'Thrilling adventure.' The Times 'This wise and touching novel has originality and a fresh voice.' Sunday Times 'A gripping adventure . . . I stayed up all night reading it!' Emma Carroll, author of Letters from the Lighthouse




Castle Rock Kitchen


Book Description

Explore 80 classic and modern recipes inspired by Stephen King’s Maine, featuring dishes from the books set in Castle Rock, Derry, and other fictional towns—with a foreword from the legendary author himself. Castle Rock Kitchen is an immersive culinary experience from the mouthwatering to the macabre, with gorgeous, moody photographs to transport Stephen King fans to kitchen tables, diners, and picnic blankets across Maine. Recipes ranging from drinks to dessert (and every course in-between) are inspired by meals and gatherings from the more than forty novels and stories set in King’s Castle Rock multiverse—a darker, more gothic version of the Maine most are familiar with. The eighty professionally developed dishes use plenty of local, down-home ingredients such as fresh seafood, potatoes, wild blueberries, and maple syrup, plus some delicacies from away—here are just a few: • Breakfast: Pancakes with the Toziers (It), Dog Days French Toast (Cujo) • Dinner: One-Handed Frittata (Under the Dome), Killer Mac and Cheese (“Gramma”) • Supper: Blue Plate Special (11/22/63), Whopper Spareribs (The Tommyknockers) • Fish and Seafood: Crab Canapés (Pet Sematary), Moose-Lickit Fish & Chips (The Colorado Kid) • Vegetarian: Wild Mushroom Hand Pies (Bag of Bones), Holy Frijole Enchiladas (Elevation) • Baking and Sweets: Hermits for the Road (The Long Walk), Blueberry Cheesecake Pie (“The Body”) • Drinks and Cocktails: Homemade Root Beer (Carrie), Deadly Moonquake (“Drunken Fireworks”) With a foreword written by Stephen King and story excerpts that connect the recipes to the books that inspired them, Castle Rock Kitchen delivers frightfully good food and drink.




Family Furnishings


Book Description

“An extraordinary collection” (San Francisco Chronicle) of twenty-four short stories from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro. “Superb . . . Munro is a writer to be cherished.”—NPR A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Minneapolis Star Tribune A selection of Alice Munro’s most accomplished and powerfully affecting short fiction from 1995 to 2014, these stories encompass the fullness of human experience, from the wild exhilaration of first love (in “Passion”) to the punishing consequences of leaving home (“Runaway”) or ending a marriage (“The Children Stay”). And in stories that Munro has described as “closer to the truth than usual”—“Dear Life,” “Working for a Living,” and “Home”—we glimpse the author’s own life. Subtly honed with her hallmark precision, grace, and compassion, these stories illuminate the quotidian yet astonishing particularities in the lives of men and women, parents and children, friends and lovers as they discover sex, fall in love, part, quarrel, suffer defeat, set off into the unknown, or find a way to be in the world.




Lives of Girls and Women


Book Description

The debut novel from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro, “one of the most eloquent and gifted writers of contemporary fiction” (The New York Times). “Munro has an unerring talent for uncovering the extraordinary in the ordinary.”—Newsweek Rural Ontario, 1940s. Del Jordan lives out at the end of the Flats Road on her father’s fox farm, where her most frequent companions are an eccentric bachelor family friend and her rough younger brother. When she begins spending more time in town, she is surrounded by women—her mother, an agnostic, opinionated woman who sells encyclopedias to local farmers; her mother’s boarder, the lusty Fern Dogherty; and her best friend, Naomi, with whom she shares the frustrations and unbridled glee of adolescence. Through these unwitting mentors and in her own encounters with sex, birth, and death, Del explores the dark and bright sides of womanhood. All along she remains a wise, witty observer and recorder of truths in small-town life. The result is a powerful, moving, and humorous demonstration of Alice Munro’s unparalleled awareness of the lives of girls and women.




Too Much Happiness


Book Description

This stunning collection of stories demonstrates once again why Alice Munro is celebrated as a pre-eminent master of the short story. While some of the stories are traditional, set in “Alice Munro Country” in Ontario or in B.C., dealing with ordinary women’s lives, others have a new, sharper edge. They involve child murders, strange sex, and a terrifying home invasion. By way of astonishing variety, the title story, set in Victorian Europe, follows the last journey from France to Sweden of a famous Russian mathematician. This daring, superb collection proves that Alice Munro will always surprise you.




The Progress of Love


Book Description

Eleven stunning stories that explore the most intimate and transforming moments of existence, from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro, “one of the foremost practitioners of the short story” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times). “Throughout this remarkable collection moments of insight flash from the pages like lightning, not necessarily providing answers—more like showing the way to new questions.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer A divorced woman returns to her childhood home where she confronts the memory of her parents’ confounding yet deep bond. The accidental near-drowning of a child exposes to the shaken mother the fragility between children and parents. A young man, remembering a terrifying childhood incident, wrestles with the responsibility he has always felt for his hapless younger brother. A man brings his lover on a visit to his ex-wife, only to feel unexpectedly closer to his estranged partner. In these and other stories, Alice Munro proves once again a sensitive and compassionate chronicler of our times. Drawing us into the most intimate corners of ordinary lives, she reveals much about ourselves, our choices, and our experiences of love.




We Have Always Lived in the Castle


Book Description

THE STORY: The home of the Blackwoods near a Vermont village is a lonely, ominous abode, and Constance, the young mistress of the place, can't go out of the house without being insulted and stoned by the villagers. They have also composed a nasty s