[Alice Munro is] a writer who has quietly and firmly established herself over the past decade. In a very real sense, she occupies [two] fictional worlds: her fiction is rooted tangibly in the social realism of the rural and small town world of her own experience, but it insistently explores what lies beyond the bounds of empirical reality. Though she has said that she is "very, very excited by what you might call the surface of life," the substance of her fiction to date suggests that this excitement must also derive in part from her intuitive feeling that there is something else of significance just below that literal surface. This may be one reason why to date she has been more attracted to the short story than to the novel…. [That] more concentrated fictional form probably allows her to explore in a more imaginative and intense way the...