Physical Attributes
Pages: 208
Height: 8.0000 in.
Width: 5.2100 in.
Thickness: 0.4700 in.
Unit weight: 0.3500 lb.
Main Description
In the stories that make up
Dance of the Happy Shades, the deceptive calm of small-town life is brought memorably to the page, revealing the countryside of Southwestern Ontario to be home to as many small sufferings and unanticipated emotions as any place. This is the book that earned Alice Munro a devoted readership and established her as one of Canada's most beloved writers.
Winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction, Dance of the Happy Shades is Alice Munro's first short story collection.
Contributors
By (author): Munro, Alice
Table of Contents
Walker Brothers Cowboy
The Shining Houses
Images
Thanks for the Ride
The Office
An Ounce of Cure
The Time of Death
Days of the Butterfly
Boys and Girls
Postcard
Red Dress—1946
Sunday Afternoon
A Trip to the Coast
The Peace of Utrecht
Dance of the Happy Shades
Biographical Note
ALICE MUNRO grew up in Wingham, Ontario and attended the University of Western Ontario (now Western University), studying journalism and English. Her first collection of stories was published in 1968 as Dance of the Happy Shades, which garnered much acclaim and won the Governor General’s Award for English fiction that year. Three years later, she published her only novel, Lives of Girls and Women. Over the next few decades, she published many more short story collections, including Who Do You Think You Are?; The Moons of Jupiter; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, from which a story was later adapted into the two-time Academy Award–winning movie, Away from Her; Runaway; and The View from Castle Rock. Her stories appeared regularly in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review.
In 1978 Munro received her second Governor General’s Award for Who Do You Think You Are? and her third in 1986 with The Progress of Love. In 2009 she won the Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work. Her final story collection, Dear Life, came in 2012, and the next year, the same year she retired from writing, she won the Nobel Prize in Literature, hailed as the “master of the contemporary short story.” Munro has also been the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the W.H. Smith Award, two Giller Prizes, several Trillium Prizes, the Jubilee Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award, among many others.
Munro died in Millbrook, Ontario, in 2024.
