The View From Castle Rock. Stories. By Alice Munro.
349 pages. $25.95.
Alfred A. Knopf; 15.99.
Chatto and Windus.
Carried Away. A Selection of Stories.
By Alice Munro. Introduction by Margaret Atwood. 559 pages.
$25. Everyman's Library.
"These are stories," Alice Munro writes in the foreword to her new collection, "The View From Castle Rock," and at first glance this note of insistence may seem a little odd.
What else would they be? What else, apart from the one novel ("Lives of Girls and Women," which is more like a cycle of stories), has Munro written over the past 40 years or so? Not, of course, that she needs to write anything else.
Those stories, 17 of which have been gathered by the author into a hefty new Everyman's Library volume with the title "Carried Away," have built a reputation that Margaret Atwood, introducing the Everyman book, describes as "international literary sainthood." More to the point, Munro's stories are composed with a clarity and economy that make novel-writing look downright superfluous and self-indulgent.
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