Selected Stories

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, and the author of Kurlek, Margaret Laurence: The
Long Journey Home, and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, lived for a time on the West Coast, and
returned to Southwestern Ontario in 1972. Her work has received the
Governor General’s Award three times and been translated into 13
languages.

Over the last 30 years, Munro’s stories have become longer, more
intricate, more psychologically complex. But a consistent trademark of
her works—from her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968)
to her most recent, Open Secrets (1994)—is the keenness of observation
she brings to the human tragicomedy.

This volume contains 28 chronologically arranged stories selected from
Munro’s seven previous collections. Many are set in the small towns of
Southwestern Ontario that Munro has made into her special territory.
Funny, subtle, wise, and beautifully crafted, these stories confirm the
centrality of Munro’s work in the body of Canadian fiction that has
attracted international admiration in the last half-century. British
novelist A.S. Byatt, for one, has called Munro “the equal of Chekhov,
de Maupassant and Flaubert.”