You may have seen that Canadian author and Nobel laureate Alice Munro passed away this week. A prolific titan of the short story genre, she published her first story in 1950 and continued to produce award-winning work in the many decades since. When asked how she got started in short stories, she said it was because that’s all she had time for.
She certainly made it work.
Here, award-winning Canadian author Margaret Atwood reads Dance of the Happy Shades by Alice Munro.
In this exclusive recording, The Handmaid’s Tale author reads the eponymous short story from the late Munro’s first collection in 1968.
If you’d like to read more of Munro’s work, here are 25 Alice Munro Stories You Can Read Online Right Now.
Enjoy!
“A story is not like a road to follow … it’s more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.”
― Alice Munro, Selected Stories
* * *
You must be logged in to post a comment.