THE MOONS OF JUPITER by Alice Munro...

THE MOONS OF JUPITER by Alice Munro (Vintage: $10). Like celestial bodies, Munro’s well-crafted characters move through their personal orbits, affecting each other from a carefully maintained distance, and occasionally colliding. In the linked stories “Connection” and “The Stone in the Field,” the narrator describes the four vivacious aunts she knew while growing up during the ‘50s, amply proportioned women “whose firm curves and proud slopes had nothing to do with sex, everything to do with rights and power.” The memories of this lively quartet force the narrator to confront the rigid snobbery of her dreary, upper-crust husband. Munro has an unusual eye for the telling detail, and even her briefest stories contain deft revelations of individual personalities, like the title character in “Prue,” who steals one of her lover’s cuff links, not out of sentiment or compulsion but because “she just takes something, every now and then, and puts it away in the dark of the old tobacco tin, and more or less forgets about it.”