SOURCE: "Mysteries Near at Hand," in The New York Times Book Review, September 11, 1994, pp. 1, 36-7.

Humphreys is an American novelist whose book on the disintegration of family life, Dreams of Sleep, won PEN's Ernest Hemingway Prize in 1985. In the following review, she praises Open Secrets as a collection of stories that "dazzles with its faith in language and in life."

On a winter night in 1919, in a hotel dining room in Carstairs, Ontario, a librarian who's had a few drinks begins to tell her darkest secrets to a salesman she barely knows. "It's a lesson, this story," the librarian says. "It's a lesson in what fools women can make of themselves."

The story, aptly entitled "Carried Away," is the first in Alice Munro's new collection, Open Secrets, her eighth work of fiction. And in fact, all the stories in Open Secrets are lessons. Ms. Munro's work has always...