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The Beggar Maid

Stories of Flo and Rose

Part of Vintage International

Author Alice Munro
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Paperback
$16.00 US
Knopf | Vintage
5.17"W x 7.96"H x 0.59"D   | 7 oz | 24 per carton
On sale May 07, 1991 | 224 Pages | 9780679732716
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“An exhilarating collection” (The New York Times Book Review) of ten blended stories from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro

“The rich texture of its narrative and the author’s graceful style make [The Beggar Maid] a considerable accomplishment.”—Joyce Carol Oates, Ms.
 
In this vibrant series of interweaving stories, Alice Munro recreates the evolving bond—one that is both constricting and empowering—between two women in the course of almost forty years. One is Flo, practical, suspicious of other people’s airs, at times dismayingly vulgar. The other is Rose, Flo’s stepdaughter, a clumsy, shy girl who somehow—in spite of Flo’s ridicule and ghastly warnings—leaves the small town she grew up in to achieve her own equivocal success in the larger world.
  • FINALIST | 1980
    Booker Prize
“Whether Alice Munro’s The Beggar Maid is a collection of stories or a new kind of novel I’m not quite sure, but whatever it is, it’s wonderful. The psychological precision . . . is a delight, and the startling twists—the unexpected leaps in time, the transformation of familiar characters—they make the book what books ought to be, a little wild, a little mysterious.”—John Gardner

“The stories are absolutely wonderful-every word she writes is interesting.”—Alice Adams

“The best stories of the year.”—The Nation
ALICE MUNRO grew up in Wingham, Ontario and attended the University of Western Ontario (now Western University), studying journalism and English. Her first collection of stories was published in 1968 as Dance of the Happy Shades, which garnered much acclaim and won the Governor General’s Award for English fiction that year. Three years later, she published her only novel, Lives of Girls and Women. Over the next few decades, she published many more short story collections, including Who Do You Think You Are?; The Moons of Jupiter; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, from which a story was later adapted into the two-time Academy Award–winning movie, Away from Her; Runaway; and The View from Castle Rock. Her stories appeared regularly in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review.

In 1978 Munro received her second Governor General’s Award for Who Do You Think You Are? and her third in 1986 with The Progress of Love. In 2009 she won the Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work. Her final story collection, Dear Life, came in 2012, and the next year, the same year she retired from writing, she won the Nobel Prize in Literature, hailed as the “master of the contemporary short story.” Munro has also been the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the W.H. Smith Award, two Giller Prizes, several Trillium Prizes, the Jubilee Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award, among many others.

Munro died in Millbrook, Ontario, in 2024. View titles by Alice Munro

About

“An exhilarating collection” (The New York Times Book Review) of ten blended stories from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro

“The rich texture of its narrative and the author’s graceful style make [The Beggar Maid] a considerable accomplishment.”—Joyce Carol Oates, Ms.
 
In this vibrant series of interweaving stories, Alice Munro recreates the evolving bond—one that is both constricting and empowering—between two women in the course of almost forty years. One is Flo, practical, suspicious of other people’s airs, at times dismayingly vulgar. The other is Rose, Flo’s stepdaughter, a clumsy, shy girl who somehow—in spite of Flo’s ridicule and ghastly warnings—leaves the small town she grew up in to achieve her own equivocal success in the larger world.

Awards

  • FINALIST | 1980
    Booker Prize

Praise

“Whether Alice Munro’s The Beggar Maid is a collection of stories or a new kind of novel I’m not quite sure, but whatever it is, it’s wonderful. The psychological precision . . . is a delight, and the startling twists—the unexpected leaps in time, the transformation of familiar characters—they make the book what books ought to be, a little wild, a little mysterious.”—John Gardner

“The stories are absolutely wonderful-every word she writes is interesting.”—Alice Adams

“The best stories of the year.”—The Nation

Author

ALICE MUNRO grew up in Wingham, Ontario and attended the University of Western Ontario (now Western University), studying journalism and English. Her first collection of stories was published in 1968 as Dance of the Happy Shades, which garnered much acclaim and won the Governor General’s Award for English fiction that year. Three years later, she published her only novel, Lives of Girls and Women. Over the next few decades, she published many more short story collections, including Who Do You Think You Are?; The Moons of Jupiter; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, from which a story was later adapted into the two-time Academy Award–winning movie, Away from Her; Runaway; and The View from Castle Rock. Her stories appeared regularly in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review.

In 1978 Munro received her second Governor General’s Award for Who Do You Think You Are? and her third in 1986 with The Progress of Love. In 2009 she won the Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work. Her final story collection, Dear Life, came in 2012, and the next year, the same year she retired from writing, she won the Nobel Prize in Literature, hailed as the “master of the contemporary short story.” Munro has also been the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the W.H. Smith Award, two Giller Prizes, several Trillium Prizes, the Jubilee Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award, among many others.

Munro died in Millbrook, Ontario, in 2024. View titles by Alice Munro

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