Note: Back in 2013, when Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature, we published a post featuring 20 short stories written by Munro. Today, with the sad news that Alice Munro has passed away, at the age of 92, we’re bringing the original post (from October 10, 2013) back to the surface–in part because you can still read the 20 stories free online. Please find the stories at the bottom of this post.

Calling her a “master of the contemporary short story,” the Swedish Academy awarded 82-year-old Alice Munro the Nobel Prize in Literature today. It is well-deserved, and hard-earned (and comes not long after she announced her retirement from fiction). After 14 story collections, Munro has reached at least a couple generations of writers with her psychologically subtle stories about ordinary men and women in Huron County, Ontario, her birthplace and home. Only the 13th woman writer to win the Nobel, Munro has previously won the Man Booker Prize in 2009, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction in Canada three times (1968, 1978, and 1986), and two O. Henry Awards (2006 and 2008). Her regional fiction draws as much from her Ontario surroundings as does the work of the very best so-called “regional” writers, and captivating interactions of character and landscape tend to drive her work more so than intricate plotting.

Whether Munro’s adherence to the short form has always been a matter of expediency, or whether it’s just what her stories need to be, hardly matters to readers who love her work. She discusses her “stumbling” on short fiction in the interview above from 1990 with Rex Murphy. For a detailed sketch of Munro’s early life, see her wonderful 2011 biographical essay “Dear Life” in The New Yorker. And for those less familiar with Munro’s exquisitely crafted narratives, we offer you below several selections of her work free online. Get to know this author who, The New York Times writes, “revolutionized the architecture of short stories.”

“Voices” – (2013, Telegraph)

“A Red Dress—1946” (2012–13, Narrative—requires free sign-up)

“Amundsen” (2012, The New Yorker)

“Train” (2012, Harper’s)

“To Reach Japan” (2012, Narrative—requires free sign-up)

“Axis” (2001, The New Yorker — in audio)

“Gravel” (2011, The New Yorker)

“Fiction” (2009, Daily Lit)

“Deep Holes” (2008, The New Yorker)

“Free Radicals” (2008, The New Yorker)

“Face” (2008, The New Yorker)

“Dimension” (2006, The New Yorker)

“Wenlock Edge” (2005, The New Yorker)

“The View from Castle Rock” (2005, The New Yorker)

“Passion” (2004, The New Yorker)

“Runaway” (2003, The New Yorker)

“Some Women” (2008, New Yorker)

“The Bear Came Over the Mountain” (1999, The New Yorker)

“Queenie” (1998, London Review of Books

“Boys and Girls” (1968)

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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