“ To Reach Japan” (2012, Narrative-requires free sign-up) “ A Red Dress-1946” (2012-13, Narrative-requires free sign-up) Regardless of the initial intention, over the course of her literary career Munro has produced countless rare and incredibly important short stories – a short list of which we have compiled below here, which you can read for free. And then when I got a little more time, I started writing these odder stories, which branch out a lot.” Perhaps I got used to thinking of my material in terms of things that worked that way.

So I wrote in bits and pieces with a limited time expectation. I couldn’t look ahead and say, this is going to take me a year, because I thought every moment something might happen that would take all time away from me. There was no way I could get that kind of time. Some of this was before the days of automatic washing machines, if you can actually believe it. I had small children, I didn’t have any help. But when I was younger, it was simply a matter of expediency. I look at what I really want to do with the material, and it never turns out to be a novel. And still! I still come up with ideas for novels. “Why do I like to write short stories? Well, I certainly didn’t intend to. It is therefore interesting to note that she didn’t set out to write short fiction and in fact always intended to write a novel, but never had the time to do so. While many literary titans are known for either their poetry or epic novels, Munro stands apart for her skill as a short story writer. “In many ways I’ve been writing personal stories all my life,” Munro has said – and those familiar with her wok will know intimately the details of her years spent with her family on their struggling mink and fox farm during the Great Depression the burden of her mother’s Parkinson’s disease in her early 40s her young experiences of marriage, motherhood and divorce. With 14 story collections, her psychologically subtle stories are nothing if not personal – and all the more intimate for it. When she received her Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013, the Swedish Academy called her “a master of the contemporary short story”. For Margaret Atwood, she is “an international literary saint”, while the New Yorker magazine describes her as “our blessing”. It is therefore fair to say that Nobel-Prize winning author Alice Munro is truly one of a kind.ĭescribed by Jonathan Franzen as having “a strong claim to being the best fiction writer in North America”, the now-retired Munro has consistently inspired devotion among her readers. Fewer still can easily be counted as staying among the literary elite for the entirety of their careers – their writing reaching across multiple generations of readers over the course of their lives. Few authors can be easily recognised as being among the greatest of their generation.

Alice munro's best selected stories