Alice Munro is considered by many to be the finest short story writer now working in English. A native of Ontario, Canada, where she presently lives, the first of her (to date) eleven volumes of short fiction, Dance of the Happy Shades, was published in 1968, the most recent, The View from Castle Rock, in 2006. Munro is a rare thing among writers of short fiction, an international bestseller. She is also widely acclaimed in the academy, and her work has been the subject of several critical monographs. Yet despite the attention Munro's stories have deservedly received in recent years, there persists a marked reluctance to deal with them as short stories. Even among enthusiastic readers of her work, one detects a desire to explain away the negative connotations of the ‘short story’ genre-mark. Hence the dust jackets of her books overflow with testimony to the novel-like quality of the stories, their satisfying range and depth and complexity of characterization. It is as though Munro is to be considered a great writer in spite of the fact that she only writes short stories.

Munro is not much given to commenting on her own writing, but in an interview in 1983 she made a comment that provides a useful starting point for the student new to her large body of work. Looking back on the style she had adopted in her first collection, she made the following observation: