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Canadian writer Alice Munro’s short stories are among the most beuatifully written and insightful pieces in contemporary literature. She appears quite often in the New Yorker but good luck finding them there. Here’s a trick that will unearth a treasure trove: go to Google and type “site:newyorker.com munro” and when the results come up, click on the cache version.

So far I’ve read:

• The View from Castle Rock
• What is Remembered
• Chance
• Wenlock Edge
• Passion

Here’s a particularly good excerpt from the later which shows how she can paint a detailed picture with a minimum of words:

‘

Then she knew. What else could it be? A bootlegger’s place. She thought of the bootlegger in the town where her aunt and uncle lived—a raddled, skinny old man, morose and suspicious. He sat on his front step with a shotgun on Halloween night. And he painted numbers on the sticks of firewood stacked by his door so he’d know if any were stolen. She thought of him—or this one—dozing in the heat, in his dirty but tidy room (she knew that it would be that way by the mended patches in the screen), getting up from his creaky cot or couch, covered with a stained quilt that some woman related to him, some woman now dead, had made long ago.