A master of the short story genre, Alice Munro is also a literary stylist, which

her debut collection, Dance of the Happy Shades , amply demonstrates. Her

typical setting is her native southwestern Ontario, yet her stories are anything

but prosaic. Munro has been said to defamiliarize the familiar ; she

reveals the dazzle of outdoors but through the lightning cracks in the drawn-down

blinds, also conjures up shadows, disquieting figures, or Gothic

mother figures. She probes into patterns of exclusion or intrusion, and often

conveys a sense of entrapment. Yet her text exudes a paradoxical sense of

freedom as she makes the art of the short story her own. Writing from

within, straying from dramatic descriptions, she depicts a landscape which is

part sunlight, part shadows, and is always a mindscape. She describes lives of

girls and women, exploring the haunting tensions between mothers and

daughters, negotiating boundaries. Playing on intertextual scraps which she

sews into the fabric of her stories, she seeks to reveal life's little ironies.