Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

Nobody for my dollar moves between front story and back story better than the Canadian author Alice Munro, whose 2013 Nobel Prize was recognition not only for the brilliance of her career but also for the possibilities of the short story as a form.

The final story in the collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” is among the most lasting fiction I’ve read, a meditation on memory and its limitations, as well as the compromises people make to help those they love and have hurt.

I love anything by Alice Munro; you can see why she won the Nobel Prize. Munro's stories sweep through huge swaths of time in simple, straightforward language; one minute you find a man in a friend’s kitchen eating a ketchup sandwich; within a few pages you are a girl again, and this man a boy, your first love, maybe. Munro’s characters are complicated, sometimes black-hearted, often conflicted and yearning, and so very real that you feel like you talked with them in the grocery store just yesterday.