In the her tenth collection, Alice 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.

A tough-minded housekeeper jettisons the habits of a lifetime because of a teenager's practical joke. A college student visiting her brassy, unconventional aunt stumbles on an astonishing secret and its meaning in her own life. An incorrigible

...

"Joan has spent a lifetime enduring the cruelties of men. But when one of them commits a shocking act of violence in front of her, she flees New York City in search of Alice, the only person alive who can help her make sense of her past. In the sweltering hills above Los Angeles, Joan unravels the horrific event she witnessed as a child--that has haunted her every waking moment--while forging the power to finally strike back. Animal is a depiction...

"Peeling apples for tartes tatin, an Ohio mother wonders how to exist in a world of distraction and fake facts, besieged by a tweet-happy president and trigger-happy neighbors, all of them oblivious to what Dupont has dumped into the rivers and what's happening at the factory farm down the interstate--not to mention what was done to the land's first inhabitants. A torrent of consciousness, narrated in a single sentence by a woman whose wandering thoughts...

A woman must come to terms with the circumcision she endured as a child in Africa In Tashi's tribe, the Olinka, young girls undergo circumcision as an initiation into the community. Tashi manages to avoid this fate at first, but when pressed by tribal leaders, she submits. Years later, married and living in America as Evelyn Johnson, Tashi's inner pain emerges. As she questions why such a terrifying, disfiguring sacrifice was required, she sorts through...

Indie Brown is forced to return to the mountains of Arizona and confront the horrible truths of her childhood.

Jill and Carrie-both married with teenage children-meet one day during Jill's lunch break at a local park. Soon a friendship is forged. A friendship that deepens with each visit. Jill's husband still lives and breathes the coach's life, a life that leaves him little time to spare for Jill. Left on her own more and more, Jill finds herself searching for the indefinable something that has been missing all her life. Married to a successful businessman,...

"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a mesmerizing and unsettling exploration of the female psyche and the stifling constraints of 19th-century society. The story is narrated by a woman suffering from what her husband and physicians diagnose as "nervous depression." She is confined to a room in her home and prescribed a treatment of complete rest. As the protagonist spends her days in isolation, she becomes increasingly obsessed...

An offbeat love story about the adventures and mutual rescue of a young woman out of place in her hometown and a mysterious stranger who calls himself Peter Parker (and begins to cast her in the role of Spider-Man's first sweetheart), The Night Gwen Stacy Died is about first loss, first love, and finding our real identities.

Megan, a bitter young medical secretary, takes a break from her overwhelming feelings of social rejection by keeping track of the disgusting habits of her co-worker, Jillian. Meanwhile, Jillian's misguided "go for it!" attitude leads her towards a series of unadvisable decisions.

Five women, friends at college, find their interlocking relationships strained when one of them, in her late thirties decides to have a second trimester abortion after delaying the decision in hopes that her husband will change his mind. The novel records the voices of her four friends as they struggle to bridge the gap between what they think they should feel and what they discover they do feel. The friends are Nan, an obstetric nurse; Anastasia,...