Fiction by Alice Munro

In honor of Alice Munro's new short story collection, I though it might be nice to take a look at a recent short story from the New Yorker. I figure if you haven't tried reading her yet, this might be a good way to ease yourself in. Because she's a great writer, and her new collection is full of scandals, death adultery and other literary items that never go out of style.

From "Dimension," by Alice Munro:

Doree didn’t fit into either category. In the whole year and a half that she had been working she had not bought herself a single new piece of clothing. She wore her uniform at work and her jeans everywhere else. She had got out of the way of wearing makeup because he hadn’t allowed it, and now, though she could have, she didn’t. Her spikes of corn-colored hair didn’t suit her bony bare face, but it didn’t matter.

On the third bus she got a seat by the window, and tried to keep herself calm by reading the signs—both the advertising and the street signs. There was a certain trick she had picked up, to keep her mind occupied. She took the letters of whatever word her eyes lit on, and she tried to see how many new words she could make out of them. “Coffee,” for instance, would give you “fee,” and then “foe,” and “off” and “of,” and “shop” would provide “hop” and “sop” and “so” and—wait a minute—“posh.” Words were more than plentiful on the way out of the city, as they passed billboards, monster stores, car lots, even balloons moored on roofs to advertise sales.