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Dance of the Happy Shades

And Other Stories

Part of Vintage International

Author Alice Munro
Ebook
Knopf | Vintage
On sale Dec 21, 2011 | 240 Pages | 9780307814548
Grades AP/IB
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Fifteen stunning short stories from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro, “a true master of the form” (Salman Rushdie).

“How does one know when one is in the grip of art—of a major talent? . . . It is art that speaks from the pages of Alice Munro’s stories.”—The Wall Street Journal
 
A young girl gets an unexpected glimpse into her father’s past when she realizes the sales call they’ve made one summer afternoon during the Great Depression is to his old sweetheart. A married woman, returning home after the death of her invalid mother, tries to release the sister who’d stayed behind as their mother’s caretaker. The audience at a children’s piano recital receives a surprising lesson in the power of art to transform when a not-quite-right student performs with unexpected musicality and a spirit of joy.
 
In Dance of the Happy Shades, Alice Munro conjures ordinary lives with an extraordinary vision, displaying the remarkable talent for which she is now widely celebrated. Set on farms, by river marshes, in the lonely towns and new suburbs of western Ontario, these tales are luminous acts of attention to those vivid moments when revelation emerges from the layers of experience that lie behind even the most everyday events and lives.
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. View titles by Alice Munro
Walker Brothers Cowboy

The Shining Houses

Images

Thanks for the Ride

The Office

An Ounce of Cure

The Time of Death

Day 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
  • WINNER | 2013
    Nobel Prize
  • WINNER | 2009
    Man Booker International Prize
Praise for Alice Munro

“Her work felt revolutionary when I came to it, and it still does.”—Jhumpa Lahiri

“She is one of the handful of writers, some living, most dead, whom I have in mind when I say that fiction is my religion.”—Jonthan Franzen

“The authority she brings to the page is just lovely.”—Elizabeth Strout

“She’s the most savage writer I’ve ever read, also the most tender, the most honest, the most perceptive.”—Jeffery Eugenides

“Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.”—Julian Barnes

“She is a short-story writer who . . . reimagined what a story can do.”—Lorrie Moore

“There’s probably no one alive who’s better at the craft of the short story.”—Jim Shepard

“A true master of the form.”—Salman Rushdie

“A wonderful writer.”—Joyce Carol Oates

About

Fifteen stunning short stories from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro, “a true master of the form” (Salman Rushdie).

“How does one know when one is in the grip of art—of a major talent? . . . It is art that speaks from the pages of Alice Munro’s stories.”—The Wall Street Journal
 
A young girl gets an unexpected glimpse into her father’s past when she realizes the sales call they’ve made one summer afternoon during the Great Depression is to his old sweetheart. A married woman, returning home after the death of her invalid mother, tries to release the sister who’d stayed behind as their mother’s caretaker. The audience at a children’s piano recital receives a surprising lesson in the power of art to transform when a not-quite-right student performs with unexpected musicality and a spirit of joy.
 
In Dance of the Happy Shades, Alice Munro conjures ordinary lives with an extraordinary vision, displaying the remarkable talent for which she is now widely celebrated. Set on farms, by river marshes, in the lonely towns and new suburbs of western Ontario, these tales are luminous acts of attention to those vivid moments when revelation emerges from the layers of experience that lie behind even the most everyday events and lives.

Author

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. View titles by Alice Munro

Table of Contents

Walker Brothers Cowboy

The Shining Houses

Images

Thanks for the Ride

The Office

An Ounce of Cure

The Time of Death

Day 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

Awards

  • WINNER | 2013
    Nobel Prize
  • WINNER | 2009
    Man Booker International Prize

Praise

Praise for Alice Munro

“Her work felt revolutionary when I came to it, and it still does.”—Jhumpa Lahiri

“She is one of the handful of writers, some living, most dead, whom I have in mind when I say that fiction is my religion.”—Jonthan Franzen

“The authority she brings to the page is just lovely.”—Elizabeth Strout

“She’s the most savage writer I’ve ever read, also the most tender, the most honest, the most perceptive.”—Jeffery Eugenides

“Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.”—Julian Barnes

“She is a short-story writer who . . . reimagined what a story can do.”—Lorrie Moore

“There’s probably no one alive who’s better at the craft of the short story.”—Jim Shepard

“A true master of the form.”—Salman Rushdie

“A wonderful writer.”—Joyce Carol Oates

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