"The Albanian Virgin" shares a sensibility with the works of such short story writers as Elizabeth Bowen (especially her "Mysterious Kor" and "The Happy Autumn Fields") and Flannery O'Connor, writers whose meticulously crafted fiction reveals the presence of the magical amidst female lives defined by layers of conflict (international, civil, domestic, psychological) and shaped to varying degrees by a yearning for an illusive sense of romantic wholeness. Indeed, Eudora Welty's oftcited description of Bowen's short fiction could apply readily to many of Munro's stories: She has an awareness of the magic of place that seems "to approach the seismetic . . . equalled only by her close touch with the passage, the pulse, of time."

With its emphasis on the complex and open-ended interpenetration of the real and the magical, "The Albanian Virgin" may be considered too within the loosely defined tradition of socalled magic realism, or the marvelous...