Dominic Balasuriya

The New York Times :

Alice Munro, the acclaimed short-story writer… told a newspaper interviewer, “I’m probably not going to write anymore.”

At eighty-two, Alice Munro joins other writers who have laid down their pens, including Philip Roth, who announced his retirement late last year. But unlike Roth, Munro’s oeuvre is composed entirely of short stories: sixty-two years spent cultivating a single genre.^{Other notable writers who have made the same choice: O. Henry, Raymond Carver, George Saunders.}

The results have been extraordinary. It really isn’t an exaggeration to say that Munro is responsible for the astonishing flexibility of the modern short story. In his introduction to the “The Best American Short Stories 2012” ^{Munro’s short story, “Axis”, appears in this collection.}, editor Tom Perrotta wrote:

The fact that it’s no longer considered risky, or even especially noteworthy, to tell a story from multiple perspectives— or to range freely across the expanse of a character’s life … —owes a lot to Munro’s formal daring, her insistence on smuggling the full range of novelistic techniques into the writing of her short fiction, and the influence she’s had on her contemporaries.

If you’re wondering where to start reading her work, Munro’s most recent collection, “Dear Life: Stories” , is an excellent place to begin. ^{And if you’re already well versed in Munro’s writing, here’s one you might have missed: “Dimensions of a Shadow”. Her very first published story, it appeared in the college literary magazine Folio in 1950, and was only recently rediscovered and republished.} “Amundsen”, a portrait of a young school teacher who arrives in a frozen Canadian town, is freely available on The New Yorker’s website.

I’m definitely going to miss reading new stories by Alice Munro, but it’s good to know that her influence on fiction is here to stay.