With the ease and mastery that have won extraordinary acclaim for her writing, Alice Munro explores the most intimate and transforming moments of experience -- moments when the shape of a life is set, moments of realization about the burden, the power, and the nature of love. Alice Munro's characters, vulnerable and inured to hardship, find themselves struggling in a brutal yet mysteriously beautiful world: a young man contends with the responsibility he feels for his brother; a divorced woman returns to her childhood home and the memory of her parents' own complicated yet enduring marriage; a man visits his ex-wife with his current lover, only to feel a closer kinship with his estranged partner and her perceptive ways. In these eleven stories Alice Munro proves once again a sensitive and compassionate chronicler of modern times. Drawing us into the potent and intimate corners of various lives, she