Stories

1. No Advantages
   1. No Advantages
   2. The View from Castle Rock
   3. Illinois
   4. The Wilds of Morris Township
   5. Working for a Living
2. Home
   1. Fathers
   2. Lying Under the Apple Tree
   3. Hired Girl
   4. The Ticket
   5. Home
   6. What Do You Want to Know For?
3. Epilogue
   1. Messenger

• See also: Index of stories in Munro's books.

Reviews

Geraldine Brooks, Washington Post, 12 November 2006

“Munro really does know magic: how to summon the spirits and the emotions that animate our lives.”

‘Native Ground.’ A.O. Scott, New York Times, 10 December 2006

“...Munro’s stories are composed with a clarity and economy that make novel-writing look downright superfluous and self-indulgent.”

‘Climbing the family tree.’ Adam Mars-Jones, The Observer, 5 November 2006

“Reading some of these stories gives the feeling of wearing unfamiliar bifocals, needing to angle the head awkwardly so as to bring the fields of vision into alignment.”

Bob Hoover, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 19 November 2006

“Those finding her work for the first time in this book, should put it down and read her earlier stories first.”

Deborah Eisenberg, The Atlantic Magazine, December 2006

“...not only every bit as beautiful and substantial a work as Munro’s readers might hope for; it is also a work of dizzying originality.”

‘Fascinating fusion of memoir and imagination.’ Jane Shilling, The Daily Telegraph, 12 November 2006

“This is a remarkable book, and anyone who has ever felt the pull of the secret past [...] should read it and marvel.”

‘The tentative trap.’ Daniel Swift, The Daily Telegraph, 5 November 2006

“...it hedges its bets somewhere between memoir and fiction, and nothing is won.”

‘A canny kind of lying.’ Hilary Mantel, The Guardian, 11 November 2006

“It is a memoir that has taken a breath, and expanded itself beyond genre and beyond the confines of one life.”

‘Dream Leaps.’ Tessa Hadley, London Review of Books, 25 January 2007

“Without ever losing her focus on these other, past lives, she also seems to be giving us a magical account of her own life in writing, tracing a history for her imagination.”

‘Life stories.’ Gail Caldwell, Boston Globe, 12 November 2006

...a learner's guide to understanding the mind that reinvents the world as story.

‘The way we were (or might have been).’ Yvonne Zipp, Christian Science Monitor, 14 November 2006

“...it's hard to imagine anything that looks less like a traditional memoir...”

Nicholas Fonseca, Entertainment Weekly, 3 November 2006

“She doesn't broach any new themes, but Munro's prodigious talent is all here.”

‘Munro brings out best along with newest.’ Floyd Skloot, San Francisco Chronicle, 12 November 2006

“Few of the stories in "The View From Castle Rock" work as fully realized fictions, and the whole fails to cohere despite the presence of an unnamed narrator meant to link them.”

Added 30 January 2008.
Updated 14 June 2008.