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I imagine that if Alice Munro were a painter, she would paint landscapes. Her finished canvases would look clear and precise as photographs - that is, they would look real - fields with apparent patches of crabgrass; subtle weeds poking up in flower beds; a river winding into the distance, its surface spotted with dead, floating fish.

Like her stories, her paintings would be perfect in terms of craft, and as truthful as possible, and probably just a little boring. (If no one else, at least I know Jodi over at MNReads agrees with me on the charges of boredom.) Still, I can never seem to pull myself away from a Munro story once I've started. I plowed through Runaway and The View from Castle Rock in the last year, without really knowing how or why. At the end of the day she's a writer I admire and appreciate, if not one I necessarily want to emulate. She's also kind of the Brett Favre of the literary world -- a couple times now she's claimed she's going to retire, but now has a new book announced for 2009.

What it is, I think, is that she is incredibly adept at creating tension, even if nothing much happens (aside from certain personal revelations and epiphanies, sly shifts in character, if not in the characters' worlds). Her story in the current issue of The New Yorker - the annual winter fiction double-issue - is less boring than most. It's got her typical traces of humor that seem carried over from the Dust Bowl era, a cast of strong female characters, and a single, incidentally weak, male character (he's dying from leukemia). But the prospect of death underscores all the mundane interactions - scenes depicting games of Chinese checkers, or boiling water - fulfilling Alfred Hitchcock's credo that two people sitting at a table talking does not constitute a story, but if you show the audience that there's a ticking bomb under the table, then you've got something.

Anyway, this isn't a review of "Some Women," but rather a suggestion that everyone read the entire fiction issue, Munro's story and all the rest. I'm posting this at least half a week late. Here's why:

I used to live with a roommate who technically was the sole leaser of our apartment. All the mail I had sent to our place ultimately was returned to sender. So I started using my mom's house as my permanent address. This meant my subscription for The New Yorker went to Mom. About once a week I'd get a call saying the new issue was out. The only way for me to get my copy was to go over to Mom's for dinner - she baited me with my own magazines. Not that I'm complaining about going to my mom's for dinner, but as the situation re-played itself every week (and continues to re-play itself, even though I've moved and can now receive mail), it's really taken on the form of a perpetual hostage situation, if a benevolent one. Also, Mom likes reading The New Yorker, and so usually the copy she'd give me would be the last week's issue, because she's always in the middle of the new one and is unwilling to give it up (or at least, unwilling to give it up without inflicting guilt of mass destruction). She's a slow reader, so sometimes the issues I get are two weeks old, actually.

If you've already read the issue and it's old news how great the stories are, then stop reading this post, I guess. I'll also say that I don't always enjoy The New Yorker's fiction, and so this issue is all the more remarkable. Sadly, as The Millions points out, it's shorter than most years' issues, because of the usual reasons of advertising versus page count, etc.

I started with Colson Whitehead's "The Gangsters." It's a fantastic story about a group of affluent black youth from New York City whose parents rent cottages in Sag Harbor every summer, and a BB gun fight they get into. I'm helping a friend put together a syllabus for an Intro to Creative Writing course she's teaching, and I think this piece would make for a great discussion on how to break down stereotypes, in a way that Philip Roth's stories used to break down stereotypes.

Then there's Donald Antrim's "Another Manhattan." It's kind of a scene taken out of The World According to Garp, wherein there are two married couples, and every of the spouses is cheating on his or her mate with the counterpart from the other couple. There's got to be a better way to write that last sentence. One of the husbands, Jim, wants to make a romantic gesture to his wife, and stops off on the way to dinner to buy flowers. Pretty quickly, though, he develops a crush on the florist, and lets her sucker him into arranging him a $300 bouquet, which he can't afford. The flower shop scene is great - Jim has to call and get his wife's credit card number so she can pay for her own roses - and I'm excited to go out and read some more of Antrim's work.

It's just really nice to see such a powerful collection of contemporary stories all bound within the same glossy covers, I wanted to do a little navel gazing. I haven't read the Roberto Bolano piece yet. Like my mom, I'm a slow reader.