Like highly accomplished people (I feel like she'd recoil at the word "genius") Alice Munro did what she did in a way that made the incredibly difficult look deceptively easy. I came late to her writing and haven't read that much work of her work but I went back to find her on the shelf after I heard she passed away. What does she do that's so right on target? Above all I think it's a kind of directness. She looks at the world squarely in the eye and then describes all that she sees there without adorning it unnecessarily. By telling us how a tree looks or the way an old barn smells or the specific character of an adolescent girl's casual cruelty, she earns our trust.  Then, slowly, and carefully she takes us by the hand further into the woods to show us the parts you don't see right away. By now she could tell us any fantastical story and we'd believe her. But  what she reveals are the detailed roadmaps of people's wants and their failings as they intersect and diverge.