Runaway
Alice Munro · 2004
Many critics consider this Munro's masterpiece. The stories are longer, more architecturally complex, with her time-loop technique at its most accomplished. The title story alone is worth the entire book.
The case against
Eight stories, three of them tracking the same woman, which leaves the collection half novel and half sampler. Munro's territory never varies: Ontario women, secret defections, decades folded into a paragraph. Her endings withhold so reliably that restraint hardens into mannerism, and read consecutively the stories begin teaching you their trick. Magnificent sentences; the weather never changes.
Short Stories · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
if this one calls to you, so will these →
