Alice Munro

There’s never been anything flashy about Alice Munro’s fiction, but she is unrivaled when it comes to sifting through seemingly quiet, parochial lives and uncovering, through small, precise details and close character study, the universal undertow.ne standing the title of greatest living short-story w In fact, her greatness has been proclaimed so often that saying anything more runs the risk of seeming like mere dust-jacket hyperbole. We will suggest this, though: Arrange a cage match between Munro and William Trevor, then award the last oriter in the English language. Pretty much everybody else you might mention in the same breath belongs on the undercard. On the other hand, the field might open up, since word is that Munro’s contemplating retirement—which would make the New Yorker’s fiction section even more of a crapshoot than it already is.