Short story writer Alice Munro just became Canada’s first recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Great, now I have to learn how to read Canadian. Here’s a brief overview of Alice Munro’s life and work.

+ Munro on why she writes short stories. “And I even start novels. But something happens to them. They break up. I look at what I really want to do with the material, and it never turns out to be a novel. But when I was younger, it was simply a matter of expediency. I had small children, I didn’t have any help. Some of this was before the days of automatic washing machines, if you can actually believe it. There was no way I could get that kind of time. I couldn’t look ahead and say, this is going to take me a year, because I thought every moment something might happen that would take all time away from me.”

+ Here’s an archive of Munro’s short stories that appeared in The New Yorker.

+ Writing short stories has always been a tough way to make a living. Technology could alter that reality a bit.