I’ve been reading Alice Munro’s short stories from The New Yorker this afternoon. I have to say they are terrific. Clear, concise, full of characterization, and beautifully structured. I felt as if I had a real sense of the people in each of the stories I read and the endings all felt exactly right.

Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013. She is Canadian and writes short stories dealing with ordinary people who find themselves in challenging but believable situations. In an article I read about her today, she said she found Chekhov’s short stories to be “a revelation” because they focused on small-town people going about their lives. She also cited some of my favorite Southern women writers as her favorites as well. These included Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, and Katherine Anne Porter. The stories I read today had women protagonists. Clearly, I don’t know if that’s Munro’s tendency since I’m just now reading her work, but I enjoyed reading these stories from a woman’s point of view.

Here is the link that I found today. You can read her stories from The New Yorker for free: