Alice Munro books

Alice Munro Anthologies Reading Order

Short Stories/Novellas

Short Story Collections

Standalone Novels

Alice Munro published short stories for over five decades, starting with Dance of the Happy Shades in 1968 and ending with Dear Life in 2012. Most of her fiction is set in small-town southwestern Ontario, where she grew up, and her stories follow ordinary people through the quiet turning points that reshape their lives. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013, and the Swedish Academy described her as “master of the contemporary short story.”

Munro wrote almost exclusively in the short form. Her only novel, Lives of Girls and Women, was published in 1971. Her story collections, from The Beggar Maid to Runaway to Too Much Happiness, return again and again to questions of memory, regret, desire, and the complicated inner lives of women in small communities. Her prose is plain on the surface but builds toward revelations that can shift the meaning of an entire story in its final lines. She remains one of the most widely anthologized English-language writers of the twentieth century.