Appreciating Alice Munro, Who Brought Innovation to Short Fiction

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In his elegant obituary of Alice Munro, the Nobel laureate who died this week in Port Hope, Ontario, Anthony DePalma writes that her stories “were widely considered to be without equal, a mixture of ordinary people and extraordinary themes.”

Alice Munro, with short gray hair and wearing a brown blouse, sits at a table in a modest kitchen. Her hands are clasped in front of her on the colorful tablecloth.

Mr. DePalma, a former Toronto bureau chief for The Times, continued: “She portrayed small-town folks, often in rural southwestern Ontario, facing situations that made the fantastic seem an everyday occurrence. Some of her characters were fleshed out so completely through generations and across continents that readers reached a level of intimacy with them that usually comes only with a full-length novel.”

[Read: Alice Munro, Nobel Laureate and Master of the Short Story, Dies at 92]

Ms. Munro and her work have long been covered by The Times. The first reference was one line in 1973 noting the publication of “Dance of the Happy Shades,” a collection of stories that had been released in Canada five years earlier.

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