About Dance of the Happy Shades. Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published thirteen collections of stories as well as a novel, Lives of Girls and Women, and two volumes of Selected Stories. During her distinguished career she has been More about Alice Munro. Well before then, Dance of the Happy Shades would establish Munro as the great writer she was destined to become. In the half century since the book’s publication, the characters remain faithful.
The Mind’s Eye shows how Alice Munro’s first collection of short stories, Dance of the Happy Shades, establishes the themes that continue throughout her work of the ensuing forty years. 
Several of the stories, such as “An Ounce of Cure” and “Day of the Butterfly,” read as narratives by a writer at the beginning of her career, experimenting with the genre of the short story and dealing with autobiographical material from her childhood, youth, and young adulthood. Others such as “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” “Images” and “The Peace of Utrecht,” already reveal Munro’s personal mastery of the form, and the preoccupations that have characterised all her work since then. She is fascinated by the role of the senses, particularly sight, in the perception of the world; by the link between the real world and the world of the imagination; by the way the past haunts the present, through unreliable memories that change over the course of time; and by the sense that secrets and mysteries can be experienced but never entirely understood. The book is divided into seven chapters that address key aspects of Munro’s collection: Genre; The Gothic and the grotesque; Memory and temporality; Growing up; Gender, mothers and fathers; Class; The artist and society.
Although these themes run across several, or most of the stories for some of them, a few representative stories are given a close reading in each chapter, so the stories of the collection are analysed as distinct narrative units. Each chapter was written by one of the two authors, and the book offers two different viewpoints on the stories, but it was also conceived collaboratively, so that the chapters complement one another.
Ailsa Cox is Reader in English and Writing at Edge Hill University, UK. She is a short story writer and critic. A short monograph, Alice Munro, was published by Northcote House in 2004. Christine Lorre-Johnston is a Senior Lecturer in English at Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris 3). Her research focuses on postcolonial literature and theory and the genre of the short story.
WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE ® IN LITERATURE 2013 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 attention to those vivid moments when revelation emerges from the layers of experience that lie behind even the most everyday events and lives. 'Virtuosity, elemental command, incisive like a diamond, remarkable: all these descriptions fit Alice Munro.' -- Christian Science Monitor '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.' -- Wall Street Journal From the Trade Paperback edition.