At the age of 81, Alice Munro is regularly heralded as one of the best short story writers of our time. Critics often place her stories in the canon of the form alongside Anton Chekhov’s and O. Henry’s. Her 14th original collection, “Dear Life: Stories,” features some of her most beautiful prose, but doesn’t always achieve the emotional rawness of her best work.

The short story, unlike the novel, is marked by its mission to create complete settings, characters and plots in a few dozen pages instead of a few hundred. All of the stories in Munro’s new collection are set on the Canadian side of Lake Ontario, where she lives. She realizes her characters with economy by forcing them to confront the great issues of life: regret, death, happiness, security, etc.

One recurring technique she employs is having one character misunderstand or not fully understand another character’s emotional state, leading the first character to do something to hurt the second, thus creating discord. This strategy taps into a universal element of human nature: our inability to understand another human as we understand ourselves. Everyone has been a victim of that great rift, whether or not we realize it.

Munro paints her settings with beautiful specificity and technical excellence. The opening paragraph of the title story, “Dear Life,” for example, contains the following description: “Marking the end of town were two bridges over the Maitland River: one narrow iron bridge, where cars sometimes got into trouble over which ones should pull off and wait for the other, and a wooden walkway which occasionally had a plank missing, so that you could look right down into the bright, hurrying water. I liked that, but somebody always came and replaced the plank eventually.”

Herein likes the strange problem with many of Munro’s stories in her new collection: The settings are so detailed, so richly written, that they often overwhelm our interest in the characters. Dialogue is used so sparingly and internal recollection so frequently that the resulting effect is often an unintentional atmospheric piece. Such stories may be skillfully and illuminatingly written, but can make for a drudging read.