Her works

• Dance of the Happy Shades (1968)
• Lives of Girls and Women (1971)
• Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (1974)
• Who Do You Think You Are? (1978)
• The Moons of Jupiter (1982)
• The Progress of Love (1986)
• Friend of My Youth (1990)
• Open Secrets (1994)
• The Love of a Good Woman (1998)
• Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001)
• Runaway (2004)
• The View from Castle Rock (2006)
• Too Much Happiness (2009)
• Dear Life (2012)

(from Wikipedia)

 

“The Shining Houses”

The narrator lives in a new subdivision, in one of the shining houses of the title. Her neighbors want to get rid of the old woman living in a run-down old house in the midst of the subdivision. The narrator does not agree.

“Oh, wasn’t it strange, how in your imagination, when you stood up for something, your voice rang, people started, abashed; but in real life they all smiled in a rather special way and you saw that what you had really done was served yourself up as a conversational delight for the next coffee party.”

And, from the very end of the story:

“There is nothing you can do at present but put your hands in your pockets and keep a disaffected heart.”

 

A long pause

It didn’t seem an unsurmountable goal to read one story a day, or thereabouts. But now it’s been, what, a couple of months? And there’s still just the one lonely post. I did actually read the second story in Alice Munro’s first book, and I enjoyed it very much, but I haven’t yet written a post about it. I’ll probably have to reread it at this point, to do it justice. Eventually.