Friend ​of My Youth

Alice Munro - The ​Progress of Love
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 the fragility of the trust between children and parents. A young man, remembering a terrifying childhood incident, wrestles with the responsibility he has always felt for his younger brother. 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.

Alice Munro - The ​Love of a Good Woman
Alice ​Munro has a genius for entering the lives of ordinary people and capturing the passions and contradictions that lie just below the surface. In this brilliant new collection she takes mainly the lives of women - unruly, ungovernable, unpredictable, unexpected, funny sexy and completely recognisable - and brings their hidden desires bubbling to the surface. The love of a good woman is not as pure and virtuous as it seems: as in her title story it can be needy and murderous. here are women behaving badly, leaving husbands and children, running off with unsuitable lovers, pushing everyday life to the limits, and if they don't behave badly, they think surprising and disturbing thoughts.

Alice Munro - Too ​Much Happiness
Short-story ​collections continue to be the bane of the publishing world - as Alice Munro herself puts it in a story here, they seem to 'diminish the book's authority, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of literature, rather than safely settled inside'. Well, the septuangenarian Munro is undoubtedly safely inside; widely considered among the best in the business, earlier this year she won the International Man Booker prize. This latest collection is, as you might expect from the mocking tenor of the title, largely concerned with the elusive nature of happiness, a state of mind that, amid the chaotic everyday inhabited by Munro's characters, is impossible to fathom or control. It starts horrifically, with a woman in therapy following the murder of her three children by her demented husband. Just when you think there can be no possible relief, Munro throws in a deft, final redemptive sentence that's the equivalent of opening a window on a stifling, locked-up-room. Many stories reverberate with the aftershock of some grotesque or traumatic childhood event, from the son who falls down a ravine in Deep-Holes and the consequences this has for his mother, to the woman in Child's Play who is forced to acknowledge the guilt she has refused to bear for the death of a fellow pupil at summer camp. Munro's prose is surprisingly rangy, almost giving the impression of artlessness, yet there's nothing remotely careless about these effortless composition that run so dangerously close to real life and which, like touching an electric fence, jolt you violently alive. (Claire Allfree)

Alice Munro - Dear ​Life
With ​her peerless ability to give us the essence of a life in often brief but spacious and timeless stories, Alice Munro illumines the moment a life is shaped -- the moment a dream, or sex, or perhaps a simple twist of fate turns a person out of his or her accustomed path and into another way of being. Suffused with Munro's clarity of vision and her unparalleled gift for storytelling, these stories (set in the world Munro has made her own: the countryside and towns around Lake Huron) about departures and beginnings, accidents, dangers, and homecomings both virtual and real, paint a vivid and lasting portrait of how strange, dangerous, and extraordinary the ordinary life can be.

Alice Munro - The ​View from Castle Rock
A ​new collection of stories by Alice Munro is always a major event. This new collection — her most personal to date — is no exception. Alice Munro’s stories are always wonderful and so ingrained with truths about life that readers always want to know where they came from. In this book, Alice Munro tells us. In her Foreword (an unusual feature in itself), she explains how she, born Alice Laidlaw in Ontario, in recent years became interested in the history of her Laidlaw ancestors. Starting in the wilds of the Scottish Borders, she learned a great deal about a famous ancestor, born around 1700, who, as his tombstone records, “for feats of frolic, agility and strength, had no equal in his day.” She traced the family’s history with the help of that man’s nephew, the famous writer James Hogg, finding to her delight that each generation of the family had produced a writer who wanted to record what had befallen them. In this way, she was able to follow the family’s voyage to Canada in 1818, and their hard times as pioneers — once a father dies on the same day that a daughter is born in the same frontier cabin. “I put all this material together over the years,” Alice tells us, “and almost without my noticing what was happening, it began to shape itself, here and there, into something almost like stories. Some of the characters gave themselves to me in their own words, others rose out of their situations.” As the book goes down through the generations, we come to Robert Laidlaw, Alice’s father, and then, at the book’s heart, the stories become first-person stories, set duringher lifetime. So is this a memoir? No. She drew on personal experiences, “but then I did anything I wanted to with this material, because the chief thing I was doing was making a story.” The resulting collection of stories range from the title story — where through a haze of whiskey Alice’s ancestors gaze north from Edinburgh Castle at the Fife coast, believing that it is North America — all the way to the final story, where we travel with “Alice Munro” today. In the author’s words, these stories “pay more attention to the truth of a life than fiction usually does. But not enough to swear on.” All of them are Alice Munro stories. There could be no higher praise.

Lucy Maud Montgomery - Akin ​to Anne
Canada’s ​L. M. Montgomery is beloved by readers from Japan to Poland as the creator of the irresistible Anne of Green Gables. In this exciting collection of rediscovered tales — none of which has been available since its original publication — L. M. Montgomery has brought to life a multitude of characters who share not only Anne’s initial loneliness and vulnerability but also her spunkiness and charm. Their stories are told in Montgomery’s own inimitable, heart-warming style. This important new collection reclaims at last a long-last part of our rich literary heritage. Never before have these charming and poignant tales of orphans been assembled within one cover. Admirers of Montgomery will treasure this anthology; it reflects her personal experience of loneliness and lovelessness, and her bittersweet memories of adversity overcome. Akin to Anne is the first in a series of rediscovered stories to be collected in book form which will be published by McClelland & Stewart.

Alice Munro - 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 an anger, regret, and infinite compassion that communicate themselves to us with electrifying force.

Alice Munro - Szeret, ​nem szeret...
Kilenc ​nő, kilenc sors, kilenc történet. A látszólag hétköznapi, ártalmatlan történetek egy életre rabul ejtik az olvasót, de ennél szebb rabságot senki sem kívánhatna magának. Alice Munro kitűnő novellista. Rengeteget tud az emberekről, ironikus és megbocsátó, stílusa áttetsző, a szerző szinte eltűnik mögötte. Nagyszerű olvasmány.

Alice Munro - The ​Beggar Maid
Born ​into the back streets of a small Canadian town, Rose battled incessantly with her practical and shrewd step-mother, Flo, who cowed her with tales of her own past and warnings of the dangerous world outside. But Rose was ambitious - she won a scholarship and left for Toronto where she married Patrick. She was his Beggar Maid, 'meek and voluptuous, with her shy white feet', and he was her knight, content to sit and adore her...

Rohinton Mistry - Swimming ​Lessons and Other Stories from Firozsha Baag
Firozsha ​Baag is an apartment building in Bombay. Its ceilings need plastering and some of the toilets leak appallingly, but its residents are far from desperate, though sometimes contentious and unforgiving. In these witty, poignant stories, Mistry charts the intersecting lives of Firozsha Baag, yielding a delightful collective portrait of a middle-class Indian community poised between the old ways and the new. "A fine collection...the volume is informed by a tone of gentle compassion for seemingly insignificant lives."—Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

Banana Yoshimoto - Kitchen ​(angol)
BANANAMANIA ​IS HERE! Discover why America is in love with KITCHEN "Love, death, mourning and the gradual recovery of the will to live are staple themes in fiction. But they receive a delightfully fresh expression in Kitchen... (a) beautifully understated work." - New York Newsday "A twenty-eight-year-old writer of wit and delicacy, Yoshimoto has indeed penned a book worth reading." - Boston Globe "Offbeat tales with a zany, blunt wit." - Time

F. Scott Fitzgerald - Flappers ​and Philosophers
Flappers ​and Philosophers was F. Scott Fitzgerald's initial encore - his first collection of short fiction, published in 1920 to capitalize on the success of This Side of Paradise, the novel that had made him famous at the age of twenty-three. Flappers and Philosophers contains some of Fitzgerald's best early stories: 'The Offshore Pirate' 'Bernice Bobs Her Hair', 'The Ice Palace', and 'Benediction'. In these narratives Fitzgerald presented his prototypical Jazz-Age heroines, beautiful and willful young women who later became trademarks of his fiction.

Lucy Maud Montgomery - Against ​the Odds
In ​Against the Odds: Tales of Achievement, Montgomery has once again created for us believable characters who live in a world she knew well and depicted lovingly and accurately, the small villages and towns of eastern and western Canada. Though her characters are distant from us in time, their problems are very similar to those we have today, and their methods of solving them not very different. Just as Montgomery’s characters have to explore all feasible methods of reaching their goals, so young people today have to be inventive and intelligent, quick to notice a need they can fill. Just as her “disadvantaged” characters have to do battle to prove their worth in the face of prejudice and distrust, so do we all today have to learn to deal with set opinions and unswerving, even if erroneous, beliefs. Old-fashioned Montgomery may be, but out of fashion, never. Against the Odds: Tales of Achievement is the fifth volume of L.M. Montgomery’s rediscovered stories to be published by McClelland & Stewart. Akin to Anne: Tales of Other Orphans, Along the Shore: Tales by the Sea, Among the Shadows: Tales of the Darker Side, and After Many Days: Tales of Time Passed preceded this collection.

Alice Munro - Dance ​of the Happy Shades
Alice ​Munro's territory is the farms and semi-rural towns of south-western Ontario. In these dazzling stories she deals with the self-discovery of adolescence, the joys and pains of love and the despair and guilt of those caught in a narrow existence. And in sensitively exploring the lives of ordinary men and women, she makes us aware of the universal nature of their fears, sorrows and aspirations.

Ismeretlen szerző - The ​Pocket Book of Short Stories
A ​collection of classic short stories includes works by Hemingway, Maugham, Mann, Tolstoi, Poe, and Balzac.

Alice Walker - Possessing ​the Secret of Joy
When ​Alice Walker finished writing THE COLOR PURPLE she realised that she needed to tell the story of Tashi, a minor character, who had "left Africa but had taken her wound with her to America". This is Tashi's story, told in her words and the voices of the people who loved her. This extraordinarily courageous and compelling novel explores the tragic consequences of Tashi's decision to go through the female initiation ceremony.

Sherman Alexie - Rick Bass - Ha ​azt mondjuk: Phoenix, Arizona / A Disznószemű legendája
Sorozatunk ​olyan vállalkozás, amely két nyelven szól, angolul és magyarul - és kettős célt is szolgál: az egyre többet használt angol nyelv szépirodalmi szintű bemutatása mellett tőlünk távolabb eső, izgalmas, sokszínű kultúrákkal is szeretné megismertetni a magyar olvasót - angol nyelven írt kortárs szerzők novelláin keresztül, egyszerre szolgálva a tanulást és az olvasás örömét. Sherman Alexie a legígéretesebb fiatal indián írók egyike. 1966-ban született, Spokane, illetve Coeur d'Alene indián szülőktől egy rezervátumban. Egész gyerekkorát végigbetegeskedte, ennek köszönhette korai olvasási szenvedélyét. Tanulmányait a Washington State University-n fejezte be, 1991-ben és 1992-ben költészetéért ösztöndíjat kapott. Addigra mintegy 300 verset, esszét, prózai írást publikált. Számos antológiában szerepelt, díjakat nyert, zenével és filmmel is foglalkozik. Egy novelláskötet és két regény áll mögötte. Írásaiban a mai Amerika rezervátumon élő indiánjainak életébe pillanthatunk be. Rick Bass 1958-as, texasi születésű szerző, eredetileg olajkutató mérnök. Jelenleg Montanában él családjával egy farmon, szinte teljesen elzárva a világtól. Tizenkét könyv szerzője, részint prózai írások, részint esszégyűjtemények kerültek ki a keze alól. Számos prominens folyóiratban publikál, és jónéhány mérvadó antológiába válogatták be, köztük a Best American Short Stories-ba. Első, 1998-ba kiadott regényét (Where the Sea Used to Be) tizenkét éven át írta, egyébként vérbeli novellaíró, aki előszerettel ír a természetről.

Raymond Carver - Beginners
_What ​We Talk About When We Talk About Love_ is Raymond Carver's most famous collection of short stories and remains one of the most influential pieces of modern literature to date. But the original, unedited manuscript, _Beginners_ - published here for the first time - was almost fifty per cent longer than the published collection. This restored version of Carver's stories reveals what was previously unsaid, filling in the narrative silences that have both inspired and mystified readers for so long. _Beginners_ is a fascinating insight into the aesthetic of a literary great and, in the questions it raises, may just spark off one of the great cultural debates of our times.

Alice Munro - Something ​I've Been Meaning to Tell You
In ​the thirteen rich stories that make up Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You, Alice Munro demonstrates the precise observation, straightforward prose style, and masterful technique that have won her comparisons to Chekhov. Exploring the mysteries, dangers, joys, and bewilderment in the lives of ordinary girls and women, Munro tells of sisters, mothers and daughters, aunts, grandmothers, and friends who shimmer with hope and love, anger and reconciliation, as they contend with their histories and their present, and what they can see of the future.

Lucy Maud Montgomery - Among ​the Shadows
These ​nineteen fascinating stories are unlike any others L.M. Montgomery ever wrote. Filled with strange and supernatural occurrences, they are peopled with drunkards, embezzlers, and thieves: A woman confesses to murder after she has passed away. . . . A righteous deacon gets a taste of his own bitter medicine. . . . An amateur photographer records a dark deed. . . . The ghost of a woman's sweetheart comes to bid her good-bye. . . . Somber, dark, and brooding, these intriguing stories suggest that love really can last beyond death and that poetic justice does exist. Each of these wonderful tales is full of the strength of Montgomery's own inner resources.