The Office

About The Office

A short story from Nobel Prize–winning Alice Munro’s first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades

“It is no exaggeration to state that Munro’s short stories are among the finest that have ever been written.”—The Dallas Morning News

The solution came to the writer one evening: she should have an office. From Nobel Laureate Alice Munro, a brilliantly executed and revelatory story—one of the earliest published works of her career—in which simply finding a place to write turns out to be the hardest act of all.
 
In “The Office,” a selection from her first short story collection, Alice Munro demonstrates the precise observation, straightforward prose style, and masterful technique hailed by John Updike, who wrote in the New York Times Book Review that “one must go back to Tolstoy and Chekhov . . . for comparable largeness.”
 
“What a stunning, subtle and sympathetic explorer of the heart Munro is.”—Ron Hansen, The Washington Post

A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” Selection