Sarah A Smith in The Guardian:
Few writers have possessed the short-story format as thoroughly as the Canadian author and Nobel laureate Alice Munro, who has died aged 92.
Although her early years as a writer were clouded by the feeling, partly the result of pressure from her publishers, that she should concentrate on producing a novel, she never embraced that genre.
Her one attempt, Lives of Girls and Women (1971), is more accurately described as a collection of interlinking tales. Throughout her career, she developed this method of cross-referencing stories and continuing themes and characters across a collection, most notably in The Beggar Maid (published in Canada as Who Do You Think You Are?), which was nominated for the Booker prize in 1980, and in the Juliet stories of the epiphanic collection Runaway (2004).
For Munro, short stories were the result of practical considerations, rather than choice.
More here.