Runaway

Runaway is the title story is this great collection of Alice Munro short stories.  As you might expect of someone who won the Nobel Prize in Literature for writing exclusively short stories, Munro is complete master of the genre.  Almost all of them have that wonderful elliptical quality of great short stories where they allude to way more than they actually say, as if there were an orchestra accompanying the soloist from just off-stage.  While you might also expect it, the other exceptional thing about the stories is the variety of women they portray.  Smart, capricious, old, young, vapid, tough.  They are all women you've met, sketched quickly but essentially, in a way that makes you notice how rare it is for a male author to really capture the inner life of these characters.  I guess I'll have to make time to read some of her other story collections.