The authors Junot Díaz and Karen Russell shared a stage on October 5th at the New Yorker Festival, where they told Willing Davidson, an editor at the magazine, about children’s appeal as literary characters, and about the advantages of fantasy as a genre. Both Russell, who wrote “Swamplandia!,” and Díaz, whose 2007 novel “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” won the Pulitzer Prize, are recipients of MacArthur “genius” grants, and both are contributors to The New Yorker.

In 2008, the New Yorker’s Fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, interviewed Alice Munro at the New Yorker Festival. In their hour-long conversation, Munro—who this week won the Nobel Prize in Literature—spoke about growing up in rural Ontario, writing her early short stories as a young mother, and the ways in which her writing process and attitudes toward her work had changed over the years.

Munro said that in her home town of Wingham, “one of the worst things you could do” was draw attention to yourself, and that hardly any women there went to college. Munro was an outsider. She began inventing stories at an early age, after making up a happier ending to Hans Christian Andersen’s tragic version of “The Little Mermaid,” which she couldn’t bear. “From then on, I just told myself stories all the time,” she said. “I had a long walk to school.”

After hearing the wonderful news this week that Alice Munro was named the thirteenth female Nobel laureate in literature, my thoughts turned toward another Canadian writer and master of the short story, Mavis Gallant. Gallant, who was born in Montreal in 1922 and now lives in Paris, published her first story, “Madeline’s Birthday,” in The New Yorker, in 1951. Over the next forty years, she contributed a hundred and fourteen short stories to the magazine, nearly as many as John Cheever.

A superb stylist, Gallant imbues her stories with images that, as Jhumpa Lahiri wrote in an introduction to “The Cost of Living” (2009), have “the intimate resonance of still-life painting.” In the 1976 story “Voices Lost in Snow,” Gallant uses the metaphor of snow to marvellous effect while describing a daughter’s strained relationship with her detached father. The daughter accompanies her father to lunch and then to visit a mistress, who had previously been on good terms with the girl’s mother. Gallant exquisitely captures the young girl’s feeling of being an observer rather than a participant—of brushing up against life. The story’s winter imagery reflects the narrator’s feelings of confusion as she gazes up at unfamiliar adult scenarios and emotions. Comparing the interactions between adult and child to a snowfall, Gallant highlights the precarious nature of childhood, when parents “seem to speak out of the lights, the stones, the snow; out of the crucial second when inner and outer forces join, and the environment becomes part of the enemy too.”

One summer, when I was nine or ten, I inherited a few thousand science-fiction and horror paperbacks from a friend of my mother’s. Over the next few months, in our damp and cobwebby basement, I raced through this library of slim, yellowing paperbacks from the fifties, sixties, and seventies, half of them with sexy space girls on their covers. There were mentalist sci-fi novels like “Dune” and “The Stars My Destination”; horror books with titles like “Night Thirst” and “The Howling”; genre-mixing novels about robot detectives, space cowboys, and galactic emperors. Some of these novels were bad, and others were great, but it didn’t matter—the main thing was that they were all defiantly and originally weird. It was the most mind-bending summer ever.

Congratulations again to Alice Munro on her Nobel Prize! To celebrate Munro’s win, Page-Turner is running a series of reflections on her work; read posts by James Wood, Deborah Treisman, Sasha Weiss, and other writers.

At the New Republic, Laura Bennett interviewed Andrew Wylie, the literary agent who is known for disdaining commercial fiction, and for his “aggressive poaching of other people’s clients.” Wylie, who has counted writers like Vladimir Nabokov, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth among his clients, spoke with Bennett about the future of the publishing industry and his short-lived partnership with Amazon, and delivered delicious one-liners on a range of other literary topics. On meeting young writers: “When they see me, it’s like meeting Ronald Reagan.” On the London Book Fair: “Like being in a primary school in Lagos.” On the e-reader sections of bookstores: “It’s like driving through a bad neighborhood. I just keep focused on the road and hope to arrive in the country.” On alternate career paths he might have taken: “I don’t have any other skills. If the industry dies, I die with it.”

The announcement that this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to Alice Munro probably strikes many readers and writers as deliriously incredible. Few contemporary writers are more admired, and with good reason. Everyone gets called “our Chekhov.” All you have to do nowadays is write a few half-decent stories and you are “our Chekhov.” But Alice Munro really is our Chekhov—which is to say, the English language’s Chekhov. (In Munro’s great story, “The Beggar Maid,” an ambitious man sees that a friend of the woman he is courting “mispronounced Metternich,” and says indignantly to her: “How can you be friends with people like that?” I’m put in mind of Chekhov’s story “The Russian Master,” which has a character who repeatedly torments a young teacher by asking him why he has “never read Lessing.”)

Yet many of Munro’s readers had sadly concluded that she was not, somehow, the kind of writer that the Nobel committee seemed to like; I had decided that she would join the list of noble non-Nobelists, a distinguished category that includes Tolstoy, Nabokov, Borges, Hrabal, Sebald, Bernhard, Ingmar Bergman—and Chekhov, as it happens.

We asked a number of writers what Alice Munro’s fiction has meant to them. Here’s what they said.

Margaret Atwood:
As I wrote in my introduction to her “Collected Stories”:

Through Munro’s fiction, Sowesto’s Huron County has joined Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County as a slice of land made legendary by the excellence of the writer who has celebrated it, though in both cases “celebrated” is not quite the right word. “Anatomised” might be closer to what goes on in the work of Munro, though even that term is too clinical. What should we call the combination of obsessive scrutiny, archaeological unearthing, precise and detailed recollection, the wallowing in the seamier and meaner and more vengeful undersides of human nature, the telling of erotic secrets, the nostalgia for vanished miseries, and rejoicing in the fullness and variety of life, stirred all together?

Editing Alice Munro’s stories is sometimes a lesson in feeling extraneous. As I’m preparing to tell her that the final paragraph isn’t landing right, she is already faxing a new ending; as I mark up page 5, to show that something hasn’t been properly set up, she is calling to say that she has put a new page 5 in the mail. Sometimes I see a paragraph on page 10 that seems an unnecessary diversion and cross it out; when I get to page 32, I understand why it was absolutely crucial to the story and have to retrace my steps. As we go through the proofs by phone, Alice throws each discussed page on the floor. Going back to an earlier scene requires scavenging. “I’ll just put the phone down for a bit,” she says. But the process is one of excitement and deep investment in the story at hand. Whenever she disagrees with a suggested edit, I virtually always see, afterward, that it was the correct thing to do. (I am using the present tense here, although Alice has officially retired from writing, because one can always hope. She tried to stop once before and somehow found herself having written another collection.)

When it was announced this morning that Alice Munro had won the Nobel Prize in Literature, phone calls and e-mails from friends started streaming in. Some people were tearful. I suspect that these little explosions of joy are happening all over the world among Munro’s fans; I also suspect that this level of emotional response (more akin to receiving family news, like the birth of a child) doesn’t happen every year when the winner of the Nobel is declared.

Munro is one of those writers who, no matter how popular her books are, is our writer. This may have to do with the frank intimacy of her tone, which is stripped of ornament and fuss, yet also, in its plainness, contains huge amounts of terrible, sublime, and contradictory feeling. It may have to do with the fact that she writes mostly about women who want to escape some kind of confinement, who are hungry for experience above all else, and who attain it at a dear price, so that we can read about it. They are elegant, wry, determined women. They are also subversives, and because they allow us into their lives, we’re dusted with their secret glamor.

Everywhere in the world may look more and more like everywhere else, but there are still a few proudly Gallic institutions that you can count on spotting in any city or town in France: cafés that thrive in spite of Starbucks, bakeries with their total indifference to things gluten-free, tabacs that keep hanging on as smokers turn to e-cigarettes. Most pleasing of all, in this age of Amazon, are the independent bookstores—around two thousand five hundred of them, all told. Paris alone has nearly seven hundred, one for every three thousand citizens, though the ratio of bookstores to readers often feels closer to one to one. If you can’t find the Colette novel you’re looking for on Rue de Reuilly, you just go two blocks over to the Rue de Charonne, or to Faubourg Saint-Antoine, where bookstores share the street with Algerian tea shops and furniture makers that predate the Revolution. This isn’t a university neighborhood with an intellectual pedigree. It’s just the way things are there—pretty different from here. In a recent study of the American cities with the most bookstores, and the most per capita, New York didn’t make the top ten in either category. To a New Yorker who spent her formative years witnessing the routing of independent bookstores by Barnes & Noble, and then the gutting of Barnes & Noble by Amazon, the situation in Paris is luxurious beyond belief.