Early in Lives of Girls and Women, readers learn that Jubilee is "not part of town, but it was not part of the country either”. Del Jordan isn’t exactly sure where she belongs either. Readers of Dance of the Happy Shades will recognize Jubilee; some of its stories take place
What is it about a title story? It always feels, to me, like the key to the collection. And while it’s true that sometimes a title story is my favourite in a collection, other times, as with “Dance of the Happy Shades”, I wondered why it was selected to bestow
Shifting past the halfway mark in this collection, I find myself as interested in drawing lines between stories as I am in following the lines drawn within the stories. And perhaps it’s partly because I have recently pulled my copy of The Lives of Girls and Women off my shelves
If I was trying to convince readers to try Alice Munro, choosing this sampling of three stories might not be the best way to approach the matter. Each is stuffed with sadness, with resignation and despair to season the blend. But it’s as though there is also a dash of
Mavis Gallant’s Home Truths Gage-Macmillan, 1981. I discovered Mavis Gallant’s stories when I was nearly twenty. I was working in a bookstore and there was a fresh display of New Canadian Library mass-market pocketbooks. (It was the same display that got me reading Alice Munro, but that, too, took some
