The Progress of Love

her—some intimate, serious nonsense—while she swayed back and forth in a response that this touch made just bearable.
    She felt rescued, lifted, beheld, and safe.)
    After dinner, they played charades. Peter was Orion. He did the second syllable by drinking from an imaginary glass, then staggering around and falling down. He was not disqualified, though it was agreed that Orion was a proper name.
    “Space is Peter’s world, after all,” said Denise. Laurence and Isabel laughed. This remark was one that would be quoted from time to time in the household.
    Sophie, who never understood the rules of charades—or, at least, could never keep to them—soon gave up the game, and began to read. Her book was The Poetic Edda , which she read every summer, but had been neglecting because of the demands of television. When she went to bed, she left it on the arm of her chair.
    Isabel, picking it up before she turned out the light, read this verse:
Seinat er at segia;
svá er nu rádit .
    (It is too late to talk of this now: it has been decided.)

ALSO BY A LICE M UNRO
THE BEGGAR MAID
    In this exhilarating series of interweaving stories, Alice Munro recreates the evolving bond—one that is both constricting and empowering—between two women in the course of almost forty years. One is Flo, practical, suspicious of other people’s airs, at times dismayingly vulgar. The other is Rose, Flo’s stepdaughter, a clumsy, shy girl who somehow—in spite of Flo’s ridicule and ghastly warnings—leaves the small town she grew up in to achieve her own equivocal success in the larger world.
Fiction/Short Stories
HATESHIP, FRIENDSHIP, COURTSHIP, LOVESHIP, MARRIAGE
    In the nine breathtaking stories that make up this celebrated collection, Munro achieves new heights, creating narratives that loop and swerve like memory and conjuring up characters as thorny and contradictory as people we know ourselves. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is tirelessly observant, serenely free of illusion, and deeply and gloriously humane.
Fiction/Literature/Short Stories
THE LOVE OF A GOOD WOMAN
    Mining the silences and dark discretions of provincial life, these tales lay bare the seamless connections and shared guilt that bind even the loneliest individuals. Munro evokes the vagaries of love, the tension and deceit that lie in wait under the polite surfaces of society, and the strange, often comical desires of the human heart.
Fiction/Literature/Short Stories/
THE MOONS OF JUPITER
    In these piercingly lovely and endlessly surprising stories by one of the most acclaimed current practitioners of the art of fiction, many things happen; there are betrayals and reconciliations, love affairs consummated and mourned. But the true events in The Moons of Jupiter are the ways in which the characters are transformed over time, coming to view their past selves with anger, regret, and infinite compassion that communicate themselves to us with electrifying force.
Fiction/Short Stories
OPEN SECRETS
    In Open Secrets , Munro uncovers the devastating power of old love suddenly recollected. She tells of vanished young schoolgirls, indentured frontier brides, an eccentric recluse who finds love at a dinner party, and a Canadian woman fleeing a husband and a lover. These stories resonate with sorrow, humor, and wisdom, confirming Munro as one of the most gifted writers of our time.
Fiction/Literature/Short Stories
THE PROGRESS OF LOVE
    A divorced woman returns to her childhood home and confronts the memory of her parents’ confounding yet deep bond. The accidental near-drowning of a child exposes the fragility of the trust between children and parents. A man brings his lover on a visit to his ex-wife, only to feel unexpectedly closer to his estranged partner. Drawing us into the most intimate corners of ordinary lives, Munro reveals much about ourselves, our choices, and our experiences of love.
Fiction/Literature/Short Stories
THE VIEW FROM CASTLE ROCK
    Alice Munro mines her rich family background, melding it with her own experiences and the transforming power of her brilliant imagination to create perhaps her most powerful and personal collection yet. 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