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“... At the beginning of her short story ‘Jakarta’, Alice Munro describes two young women who choose a spot on a beach because it’s sheltered and because ‘they want to be out of sight of a group of women who use the beach every day. They call these women the Monicas.’ The Monicas have two or three or four children apiece; they build a temporary domestic encampment on the beach (‘diaper bags, picnic hampers, inflatable rafts and whales, toys, lotions’); and their conversation revolves around the cheapest place to buy meat, the uses of zinc ointment, soda’s superiority to baking powder ...”

“... the same methods, but it’s a bit like having someone walking over your grave a bit too soon.’ Alice Munro was there as well, glowing like a microfiche machine that contained clippings of all the weird prairie marriages that had taken place in the nation’s history. Engel was living in a renaissance, which is always a jostle full of human elbows and ...”

“... like Bob, but not in big cities.’ You see that, sometimes, she fuelled her loves with hates. Alice Munro​ , writing in 1980, laid her finger on the sore spot of Cather appreciation in a short story called ‘Dulse’. The narrator, a 45-year-old woman, encounters an 81-year-old Cather devotee at a country inn – a deliberate echo, perhaps, of ...”

“... way Lahiri has written herself into a craftsmanlike tradition running back from William Trevor and Alice Munro, via Hemingway, Katherine Mansfield and Dubliners, to the Russians translated by Constance Garnett. She has been admired since the beginning of her career for her restraint and the air of naturalness she gives her effects. It isn’t hard to ...”

“... so many pieces being extremely short is that quite modestly substantial ones (by the standards of Alice Munro, let alone Henry James) come to seem monumental. Two of these longer pieces, not widely separated in the book, make claim to some sort of symmetry with their titles (‘The Cows’ and ‘The Seals’), when in fact they represent opposite ...”

“... tremendous EGO’ required to do the work? Simone de Beauvoir, Gertrude Stein, Hannah Arendt, Alice Munro, Jeanette Winterson, Anne Carson. Why am I even making this list? By the end of the book, I felt for Flaubert. ‘The humid element’, the ‘tears, chatter, breast-feeding … menses’, was too much for me, too. I was more comfortable in Part ...”

“... a writer himself only heightens the matter. Finkel becomes his writing tutor, sending stories by Alice Munro and Lorrie Moore, and buying him a copy of the New Oxford American Dictionary (‘which cost me $45.50’), as if the gift would begin to compensate Longo for the damage the journalist was about to do with words. It looks as though Longo may have ...”

“... Norton turns outward to include a staggering array of post-colonial writers, from Chinua Achebe to Alice Munro to Les Murray. (None of the ten 20th-century authors added to this edition is English.) The Longman translates US multiculturalism more obliquely into UK devolution, turning inward to trace cultural differences within the British Isles, from the ...”

“... the possible perils of such hyperbole ... but I digress. Having now read rather more of Munro’s fictions, I am in a position to reveal to a breathlessly anticipatory world that the down-to-earth social realism of the Studge saga is present throughout the oeuvre. This is not, by and large, the quality for which Saki has been most praised, but it ...”

“... and fortitude. Gazing in wonder at Uncas’s ‘free air and proud carriage’, the young fair Alice feels as if she’s looking ‘upon some precious relic of the Grecian chisel’. Alas, a ‘precious relic’ of a passing era is what Uncas proves to be, a ‘vanishing American’, the last of the Mohicans of the book’s title. Cooper goes to some ...”

“... he was a bit of a dark horse. Sitting there with his hands pressed together like something out of Alice in Wonderland he gave no hint of what he was thinking and so she was pleasantly surprised to find on reading his biography that he had said afterwards that had she been a boy he would have fallen in love with her. Of course he couldn’t actually have said ...”

“... as they find it off-putting.One of the extras asks me what I am reading. I show him my book, some Alice Munro short stories, whereupon he says, ‘I’m reading this,’ and takes out a paperback of My Secret Life, the saga of the sexual adventures of a middle-class gentleman in Victorian London. It’s a book with more sex per page than almost any ...”