When I was a child, my mother told me that by the time I was old enough to die, a machine would have been developed to prevent it. Like the child in “The Eye,” I believed in this consolation until an inappropriate age, when its impossibility arrived all at once, with a similar hollowing force. The experience of recognizing a moment of your own emotional life in a piece of fiction — the reason, I think, that most of us read fiction — is especially characteristic of Munro’s work [...]