Alice Munroe is blowing my mind. If I like her, who else should I read?

Currently reading Too Much Happiness. It’s incredible to me how she often accomplishes two or three things with a single sentence… but that it feels graceful and elegant, not forced.

My two favorite authors are Raymond Carver and James Baldwin, but even only having read a few stories, she’s elbowing for space up there.

What I like:

* prose is pretty, but not fussy; efficient, but not in a way that feels stripped bare

* the stories often have smaller stakes that — what’s cool about that is that they could realistically go a bunch of ways, and you don’t know what to expect

* perspective is front and center; the world is stained by the characters’ experiences, and makes me look at the world in new ways

* if they were news articles instead of fictional stories, I could believe these things actually happened

* I’m partial to short stories

by CantSpeakKorean