The eight stories in Alice Munro's new collection exhibit the classic features of her former collections.

	"RUNAWAY" By Alice Munro Knopf ($25) Alice Munro

For one thing, the stories are novels in miniature -- long in pages and large in scope, often featuring the key scenes of a character's lifetime or personal history.

The protagonists are smart, essentially independent women whose lies, evasions and whimsical self-assertions are their ways of coping with the enormity of desire and the social pressures to marry.

"In the town where she grew up her sort of intelligence was often put in the same category as a limp or an extra thumb."

Life contains illness, accident, gore -- the body falls apart, and Munro is not squeamish about reminding us.

"This was when the flames had reached the body, bringing the realization, coming rather late, that consumption of fat, of heart and kidneys and liver, might produce explosive or sizzling noises disconcerting to hear."

The natural world is honored with specifics of trees, birds, skies.

"Just beyond their back yard began a vacationland wilderness of rocky knobs and granite slopes, cedar bogs, small lakes and a transitional forest of poplars, soft maples, tamarack, and spruce."

These stories must be read slowly and savored. They will change your tempo as Eastern theater and dance do, making you notice what is small or still, making you reflect. They are built of startling moments, long back stories, leaps of time and place.

There is no simple causal train to take the protagonist from A to Z. What happens is odd, skewed, inner and hardly predictable.

Carla of the title story is a large, earthy young woman, married to Clark, whose reckless sexuality is both appealing and threatening. He wants to blackmail their employer, Sylvia, with a claim that her deceased husband made improper moves on Carla. The emotional connections go something like this:

Clark feels a deep scorn for Sylvia, who is excessively fond of Carla, who is more than a little afraid of her own husband and whose clearest emotion is despair over their missing goat, Flora.

She loved Flora. When Sylvia Jamieson (selflessly, she believes) helps Carla to leave Clark, truths emerge -- but they are plural truths, nothing simple about the resolution.

"Chance," "Soon," and "Silence" are a trio of related stories with a repeating protagonist, Julia.

In "Chance," Julia finds a lie she told becoming true -- her romantic destiny is tied to a man who has an ill wife. Julia is a scholar of Greek, and the story that becomes her life is as wild as any myth and owes something to several of them.

She is a morally superior sort in all three stories. In "Soon," she takes her young daughter with her on a trip home. Her "remove" from ordinary and repressive morality makes it difficult for her to find kindness for her ill mother, her oddball father and the community she was born into.

By "Silence," many years have passed. Julia is alone. The daughter she treasured above all else has joined a religious cult and is out of reach. Is Julia's "character" -- her intelligence, her unwillingness to be ordinary -- the culprit in all three stories?

Grace, the lead of "Passion" (like Julia, hungry for learning and a misfit because of it), takes up with Maury, a good man who adores her. All the while, she rattles with intelligence, willfulness, desire.

And what is she -- poor, a restaurant worker, in yet another repressive atmosphere -- to do with all her unseemly wanting?

Maury's alcoholic half brother provides the answers. His despair is rich and deep and suicidal. Grace drinks him in and survives.

The final three stories seem in various ways less monumental than the earlier ones, although two of them cover enormous spans of time.

"Trespasses" is the story of the repeated wrongs done to a child by attractive bohemian parents. "Tricks" turns on error, accident -- a lifetime altered by odd mistakes and judgments -- and is almost a refutation of the causal being at the heart of a story. "Powers" moves from playful diary entries that sound like the young voice in Eudora Welty's "Why I Live at the P.O." to reportage of the main character's more sober adult life nearly 50 years later, when the past is just within reach, just out of reach.

Munro has been called Chekhovian in that she writes the comedy of ironic twists and hidden intentions. She is also, in these later stories, Beckettian, telling tales of reduction.

She is rightly known for having refined and redefined the workings of the short story.