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Dance of the Happy Shades: And Other Stories
by
Alice Munro
In these fifteen short stories--her eighth collection of short stories in a long and distinguished career--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 attentio...more
Paperback, 240 pages
Published
December 21st 2011
by Vintage
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I think I've got to stop reading story collections. I get bored with the repetition of an author's style.
But I did find a lot of it interesting, such as this:
A house is all right for a man to work in. He brings his work into the house, a place is cleared for it; the house rearranges itself as best it can around him. Everybody recognizes that his work exists. He is not expected to answer the telephone, to find things that are lost, to see why the children are crying, ...more
But I did find a lot of it interesting, such as this:
A house is all right for a man to work in. He brings his work into the house, a place is cleared for it; the house rearranges itself as best it can around him. Everybody recognizes that his work exists. He is not expected to answer the telephone, to find things that are lost, to see why the children are crying, ...more
Stories of middle-class life - feeling out-of-it at a high school prom, having to endure a piano recital in an old lady teacher's home, being fitted for a home-made red dress because there was no money to buy one, a girl sneaking a peak at a horse being shot so there would be food to feed foxes her father was growing, trying to write in a rented office while being disturbed daily by the landlord, walking with your father to gather muskrats from traps...there are many more, and at least three tim...more
I chose this book for an independent reading project in my high school fiction class. My teacher suggested Munro because he though I could identify with her particular writing style. This collection kept me enraptured with plot, characters, and the numerous nuggets of unexpected beauty dispersed throughout. Alice Munro is a brilliant writer, a fact I believe can be affirmed by the end of the titular story, Dance of the Happy Shades. Her stories and the characters within them have the uncanny abi...more
This is Alice Munro's first collection of short stories (1969). I knew she was a great short story writer and read a few of her stories here and there. I decided to read this collection. She is a Canadian and her stories are set in western Ontario. The people whose lives she enters are isolated and their lives never seemed to be touched by the outside world. In these often mean, old-fashioned setting she explores love and sex, family relationships, class tensions, growing up and growing old. She...more
Originally published in 1968, this is the collection of short stories that plummeted Alice Munro into acclaim in the literary world. Although the stories are memorable for their ability to evoke the emotion and minutiae of the everyday, they would more likely appeal to those who are old enough to have some understanding or knowledge of the Canadian experience of Munro's youth in the 1940s and 50s. In some ways, these stories are startlingly unique and universal at the same time, and some some le...more
What what? Can this actually be a genre (or sub-genre)?
Either way, after the long wait to actually read some of her work, it appears I am in love with Alice Munro.
(here you have the most appropriate image from the first page of a "Southern Ontario Gothic" image search.)
Either way, after the long wait to actually read some of her work, it appears I am in love with Alice Munro.
(here you have the most appropriate image from the first page of a "Southern Ontario Gothic" image search.)
Like the children in fairy stories who have seen their parents make pacts with terrifying strangers, who have discovered that our fears are based on nothing but the truth, but who come back fresh from marvellous escapes and take up their knives and forks, with humility and good manners, prepared to live happily ever after-like them, dazed and powerful with secrets, I never said a word. (Images)
Thankfully Munro stores up those childhood secrets and works them with a strange alchemy into...more
Thankfully Munro stores up those childhood secrets and works them with a strange alchemy into...more
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This is my first expierence of Alice Munro - an author I had heard good things of previously. These stories are beautifully written. Each story is satisfying, with characters you can't help but care about. This is something I don't always find with short stories, that the reader is able to step into the world the author is writing about within just a few pages. However each of these stories is set in the same sort of community, and so it becomes easy to step into the lives of these rural people...more
This is Alice Munro's first published collection. I hadn't read it for some years, and I'd forgotten how perfect some of the stories are. Such sureness of touch: it includes several of my favourite stories, notably Boys and Girls, Dance of the Happy Shades, and most especially Red Dress -- 1946. The comparisons with Chekhov and VS Pritchett are thoroughly justified.
I'm glad I got out of my comfort zone and read this book of short stories. Munro knows how to set a scene and develop a character in a matter of paragraphs, which is nothing short of astounding. Her writing is flawless, but I just couldn't get behind the dreary hopelessness of all the characters and their situations. It's certainly true-to-life, but just not my thing.
I love all of Alice Munro's short stories, and she shows the same careful attention to seemingly undramatic moments in these stories as she does in her later work. Nonetheless, this is her first collection of short stories, and I like her later stories better. These feel somewhat less subtle to me than her later work. I did love the title story.
This should be a 5-star for quality - I can't fault the spare prose and the way it speaks mind-to-mind, without ever a false note. There was a range of moods and I think my favourites were the creepy (The Office), the bittersweet (Walker Brothers Cowboy), the uncannily evocative of adolescence (Red Dress - 1946). I will have to read more Munro, when I can take the melancholy.
Just a couple of the stories in this collection fell a little flat for me at the end -- however, every story surprised me in some way, all were masterfully crafted, and all were engrossing or interesting. I love Munro more every time I read another collection. Her stories are about ordinary people but they are gripping and emotional.
The beginning of my campaign to read all of Munro's books...in order. I was 5 years old when this one, her first, came out. Love it. The outskirts of Canadian towns, the young girls and women on the brink of learning some kind of truth about the world or about themselves, the language-always gorgeous, never overdone. Love it all.
I picked this book up at a small English bookstore in Krakow, Poland last spring. It kept me company while I was there and it is a unique book for its time.
This sad, ugly narrator, full of pride and self worth misses the epiphany of the story and somehow I like it. Its a brilliant bit of work.
My current reading obsession is short story collections by Canadian writer Alice Munro. The Dance of the Happy Shades is her first book, and although the stories are shorter they are still powerful, with complex endings that are never pat or even necessarily what you expect.
I will read anything and everything Alice Munro has written. Very enjoyable book in a short-story format.
Dance of the Happy Shades is my favourite Alice Munro story. I'll never forget those deviled eggs.
i wanted to love this book more then i did. i do love a short story, but i found myself not interested in the setting and characters. i did find it entertaining and i wouldn't say i didn't like it per se, but contextually i wasn't pleased.
Julie M
rated it
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review of another edition
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review of another edition
Recommends it for:
Deb, Sara M., Mary
Recommended to Julie by:
Marge Barrett
A true master short story writer. Canda's "Checkov". I took a class at the Loft in Minneapolis and we studied her short stories and Checkov's. I love how she makes the ordinary intersting and universally connecting. Females will likely prefer her writing because it is relational and not terribly action- or plot-driven. Alic Munro's daughter writer that she 'imagines reality accurately'. It seems odd that she is a fiction writer, when these stories are so obviously drawn from her life. ...more
Tried to read this in July 2010 but it was too somber and introspective for that time.
Alice Munro's first collection--her voice and themes are already there, full-fledged.
Doug Ebeling
added it
Fascinating early stories. A master.
Excellent collection of short stories. I can't put my finger on why I'm not more excited about it. Blue Bookcase review: http://thebluebookcase.blogspot.com/2011...
These stories were so good that when I read the last one, I wandered around the house wondering what I did with myself before I started reading this book.
The best thing about Alice Munro's stories are how easy they are to read and read, over and over again. I keep going back to them and finding some hidden pearls of wisom or a tale underneath a story that I never noticed before. The stories keep me thinking for days and more in depth each time I go back to them.
I enjoyed the first short story... lovely language. November 5 and I am still reading.. not much time these days. Enjoying the short stories.
Took me about 2 months to complete not due to any fault of the book. Rather the dark side of life but well-written and some insights that resounded with my own.
Took me about 2 months to complete not due to any fault of the book. Rather the dark side of life but well-written and some insights that resounded with my own.
While not as experimental as Something I've been Meaning to Tell You, Dance of the Happy Shades still makes country life seem familiar to a suburbanite. The stories aren't absorbed in themselves or their tragedies but come off more as a calm narration only in need of a reader.
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Alice Ann Munro, née Laidlaw (born 10 July 1931) is a Canadian short-story writer who is widely considered one of the world's premier fiction writers. Munro is a three-time winner of Canada's Governor General's Award for fiction. Her stories focus on human relationships looked at through the lens of daily life. She has thus been referred to as "the Canadian Chekhov."
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