Joyce Maynard

Choose any collection, you can’t go wrong. Over her long and brilliant career, Alice Munro populated a world of strange, troubled, damaged, unique and somehow also universal characters, set them into motion and let them live on the page. She never wrote a novel, and never needed to. I love the form of the short story—love Mavis Gallant and Shirley Hazzard and Laurie Colwin and Tillie Olsen, Jhumpa Lahiri (hmmm…. all women here)—also James Baldwin, Raymond Carver, Chekov, of course. But the one to whom I return most frequently, as a student, is Munro.