[Prestidigitweeze]

One of the great things about Alice Munro's win is that it brings attention back to the short story in an age when readers, agents, publishers and critics seem interested in the novel above all else. A miniaturist's commitment to writing well can be at least as profound as a novelist's.

And of course, the award draws attention to other exceptional Canadian writers who have yet to be discovered by the rest of the world's reading public.

Having lived in Canada briefly and in the Northwest during my formative years, I'm partial to what I call an overcast sensibility -- a slightly dark tone or aesthetic which seems to go with cloudy weather -- in many of the writers I admire. Alice Munro has that, but so do a lot of other Canadian novelists (from Margaret Atwood to Nicole Lundrigan).

Stylistically, Munro occupies a place which I very much respect. She's perfected a kind of stripped-down prose and structure that reject the inessential, which is why her work can be classically spare without becoming minimalist (a school which can lead to banal forms of excess at least as often as the kinds of writing which minimalists reject). She's concise without being mannered or representative of some once-trendy school of writing imposed by publishers and MFA programs. She's a writer who became herself before anyone else could define her.