Dance of the Happy Shades and Other Stories

Blurry, and ill printed copy. Evident what I received is an illegal copy. Don't buy!

If I could write a letter to Ms Munro, it would simply say...thank you for sharing your gift, and then probably, quit reading your fan mail and write some more short stories! Munro's gift is to make the simplest tale accessible to every reader, and whatever twists and turns she may take you on, your brain in sheer delight will exclaim..."of course!" She is capable of making the most isolated 1930's farm come alive to modern urban condo dwellers. Like a Rosetta stone of feeling and emotion, she allows the readers to inhabit the characters fully, regardless of gender or personality or circumstance. This collection is further evidence and testament to that gift, and of that genius. Write on, Ms Munro, write on!

If you haven't read Alice Munro before, you're in luck! you have some ten volumes of the best writing in English to select from! This collection includes some of Munro's earliest stories, at least as early as 1968, and one of her best known, "The Red Dress". It's a good starting place. If you've already read Munro's later story-suites, such as Runaway, then you'll be intrigued to find a less distinctive but equally crafty word-artist in Happy Shades. The stories in this collection are less interpenetrating, less like a novel in the form of a suite, than in other collections, but that's not a flaw, just a difference. One story (I won't declare which) ranks in my mind as a classic equal to any in English. If a short-story writer is ever to win the Nobel Prize, in my opinion it should be Alice Munro.

I hadnt read much Alice Munro before but I was very impressed with this collection of stories. There's a wonderful understatement about the entire collection, but each story resonates with its own life and people. I loved the melancholy and moody landscapes, the other-worlds of women and children mainly on farms and villages. I think good stories create their own unique life; after all, why else would we care about characters who we meet and get to know so briefly? But we DO care about the characters; somehow they matter and though nothing is resolved sometimes, somehow everything has changed. The ordinary transformed.