Short Stories Are A Good Thing

I feel like I should open this post with a confession; I haven't read Alice Munro. Nevertheless, her just-announced Nobel Prize has got a lot of people talking, and one thing in particular seems to be coming up again and again - the fact she wrote short stories.

Lots of writers write short stories, of course (or short fiction, or stories, or whatever you wish to call them). Munro simply wrote more short pieces than anything else. She has one novel, but ten collections. That's hard to do in a w...