(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)<br><br><i>Carried Away</i> is a dazzling selection of stories–seventeen favorites chosen by the author from across her distinguished career.<br><br>Alice Munro has been repeatedly hailed as one of our greatest living writers, a reputation that has been growing for years. The stories brought together here span a quarter century, drawn from some of her earliest books, <i>The Beggar Maid </i>and <i>The Moons of Jupiter,</i> through her recent best-selling collection, <i>Runaway. </i><br><br>Here are such favorites as “Royal Beatings” in which a young girl, her father, and stepmother release the tension of their circumstances in a ritual of punishment and reconciliation; “Friend of My Youth” in which a woman comes to understand that her difficult mother is not so very different from herself; and “The Love of a Good Woman,” in which, when an old crime resurfaces, a woman has to choose whether to believe in the man she intends to marry.<br><br>Munro's incomparable empathy for her characters, the depth of her understanding of human nature, and the grace and surprise of her narrative add up to a richly layered and capacious fiction. Like the World War I soldier in the title story, whose letters from the front to a small-town librarian he doesn't know change her life forever, Munro's unassuming characters insinuate themselves in our hearts and take permanent hold.