Munro unveils 1st collection after her Nobel win

A year after Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize for literature and was cited for her mastery of the modern short story, her publisher has collected 24 of her stories published over the past two decades.

Family Furnishings serves as a companion volume to an earlier compendium, Selected Stories, and is as good a place as any to get acquainted with her distinctive voice: pitiless and tender, solemn and sly, elegant and clunky, and always terrifyingly intelligent.

The stories are mostly written in a straightforward key, yet some are strange and experimental - parts of My Mother's Dream, for instance, are narrated by an infant. They veer sharply backward and forward in time, the point of view shifting among a host of major and minor characters.