Alice Munro

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Many of Munro's stories are set in (Huron County, Ontario). Her strong regional focus is one of the features of her fiction. Another is the all-knowing narrator who serves to make sense of the world. Many compare Munro's small-town settings to writers of the U.S. As in the works of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, her characters often confront deep-rooted customs and traditions. However, the reaction of Munro's characters is less intense than their Southern counterparts'. Thus, particularly with respect to her male characters, she may be said to capture the essence of everyman. Her female characters, though, are more complex. Much of Munro's work exemplifies the literary genre known as Southern Ontario Gothic.
Susanne Becker, ''Gothic Forms of Feminine Fictions'', 1999.

Munro's work is often compared with the great short story writers. For example, the American writer, Cynthia Ozick, called Munro "our Anton Chekhov." In Munro stories, as in Chekhov's, plot is secondary and "little happens." As with Chekhov, Garan Holcombe notes: "All is based on the Epiphany, the sudden enlightenment, the concise, subtle, revelatory detail." Munro's work deals with "love and work, and the failings of both. She shares Chekhov’s obsession with time and our much-lamented inability to delay or prevent its relentless movement forward.

A frequent theme of her work—particularly evident in her early stories—has been the dilemmas of a girl coming of age and coming to terms with her family and the small town she grew up in. In recent work such as ''Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage'' (2001) and Runaway (2004) she has shifted her focus to the travails of middle age, of women alone and of the elderly. It is a mark of her style for characters to experience a revelation that sheds light on, and gives meaning to, an event.

Munro's spare and lucid language and command of detail gives her fiction a "remarkable precision," as observes. Munro's prose reveals the ambiguities of life: "ironic and serious at the same time," "mottoes of godliness and honor and flaming bigotry," "special, useless knowledge," "tones of shrill and happy outrage," "the bad taste, the heartlessness, the joy of it." Her style places the fantastic next to the ordinary with each undercutting the other in ways that simply, and effortlessly, evoke life.