Alice Munro's new book

From The San Diego Union-Tribune: In her new book The View From Castle Rock Alice Munro mixes stories with autobiography.

'Alice Munro has been writing fiction since 1950. She has only published short stories, unless one counts Lives of Girls and Women (1971), which is labeled a novel but is really a series of interlocking stories ...'

This is indeed remarkable, given how we live in an age where 1000 page plus footstools have become the norm, and where most publishers (particularly in the UK which publishes 200,000 books a year) will not even consider looking at a collection of short stories. Ask Tash Aw. But where would most readers be now if not for our diet (in our formative years) of Poe or Dahl? Or for that matter even PG Wodehouse? Or Phillip K Dick, Murakami and, of course, Borges. The list is too long. (Another short story writer I admire tremendously - especially for her technique - is Bharathi Mukherjee.) Yes, it is true that short story prizes are (slowly and, it appears, grudgingly) coming back, but the truth is it has become unfashionable to be seen (reading or not reading) a small book in public. The thicker the better it appears even if it is airport fiction or Harry Potter, like as if people who read thick books look more intelligent then those who read small ones. Try telling JM Coetzee or Milan Kundera that.

The San Diego Union-Tribune continues: But her new book surprises, for while it's billed as a collection of stories, it resides in a halfway house between fiction and autobiography ..." They were not memoirs," she writes in a Foreword, "but they were rather more personal than the other stories I had written, even in the first person."