Among the many reactions to Alice Munro’s well-deserved winning of the Man Booker International Prize, one of the more interesting is that of The New Yorker, the magazine that has published the lion’s share of Munro’s stories over the decades.

On The Book Bench, the magazine’s book blog, Willing Davidson claims that “the arrival of a Munro story in the fiction department is always an event “ her typescript pages, with their oddly bolded paragraphs, produce an almost atavistic salivary response.”

Really? They actually salivate when a new story arrives? Munro’s stories are great and all, but you know you’ve perhaps given over too much of your life to literature when you find yourself preparing to eat one.

Though, given how dry Munro’s prose style can be, perhaps a little spit is exactly what’s needed.