"Munro's work endures-its wholeness of vision, its complexity of feeling, its tolerance of mind."
—Lorrie Moore

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. They live and breathe; in the finely drawn detail of their lives we find a reflection of ourselves. Passions hopelessly conceived, affections betrayed, marriages made and broken: the joys, loves, and awakenings of women echo throughout these twelve unforgettable stories, laying bare the unexceptional and yet inescapable pain of human contact.

From the opening story exploring family relations to the poignant story that closes the collection, this is “vintage Munro.”

Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published ten previous books-Dance of the Happy Shades; Lives Of Girls And Women; Something I've Been Meaning To Tell You; Who Do You Think You Are?; The Moons Of Jupiter; The Progress Of Love; Friend of My Youth; Open Secrets; The Love of a Good Woman; and Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage-as well as Selected Stories, an anthology of stories culled from her dazzling body of work.

During her distinguished career, Munro has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including the W.H. Smith Award in the United Kingdom and, in the United States, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, the Lannan Literary Award, and the Rea Award for the Short Story.

In Canada, her prize-winning record is so extraordinary-three Governor General's Awards, two Giller Prizes (one of which was for Runaway), the Trillium Book Award, the Jubilee Prize, and the Libris Award, among many others-that it has been ironically suggested that as such a perennial winner, she no longer qualifies for new prizes. Abroad, acclaim continues to pour in. Both Runaway and Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best Book Award, Caribbean and Canada region, and were chosen as one of the Books of the Year by The New York Times.

Alice Munro's stories appear regularly in The New Yorker, as well as in The Atlantic Monthly, Saturday Night, and The Paris Review. She and her husband divide their time between Clinton (in “Alice Munro country”), Ontario, and Comox, British Columbia.

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Alice Munro's profile page

Lorrie Moore's profile page

"Witty, subtle, passionate, it's exceptionally knowledgeable about the content and movement—the entanglements and entailments—of individual human feeling. And the knowledge it offers can't be looked up elsewhere. . . . The freshness of Mrs. Munro's literary performance has little to do with situation, everything to do with character. . . . [Munro is] a gifted evoker of place [and] an uncommonly powerful summoner of passionate physical encounter. . . . Her sense of style and craft is impeccable. . . . In The Moons of Jupiter moments of feeling are known as favorite rooms are known, undemonstratively but considerately. . . . Alice Munro at her best is an engrossingly truthful ''taker into account''; rewards await readers unacquainted with her work." —The New York Times
"Munro's versatility is on display. . . . Munro's lean, graceful narrative skills are firmly demonstrated throughout." —Kirkus Reviews

"The Moons of Jupiter provides a series of stories around characters we've come to recognize as signature to the author. If her heroines are familiar, however, her stories are not, always fresh with a self-deprecating honesty that makes each story so accessible and true." —Bustle

"In true Munro style, emotion floods the narrative at perfectly calibrated moments, though the diction never changes. How does she manage this invisible feat? By never losing sight of the fact that our emotions are precisely where we contain our defences; never one without the other. And so, there is always emotion and never sentiment." —Anne Michaels
Praise for Alice Munro

"[A] master of the contemporary short story." —The Swedish Academy (Nobel Prize)

"She lures readers into her imagined world and then shakes them up with plot twists and character revelations that seem to come out of nowhere, but quickly become chillingly plausible. How does she do it, is a question that literary critics have posed for years. Despite all the theories, the simplest answer suffices: She is a genius." —The Globe and Mail

"In a really short space of time, [Munro] can provide a fully realized story that provides remarkable insight into human beings, their shortcomings, their complexities, their loves, their lives." —NPR