Margaret Atwood's stories [in Dancing Girls], taken as a whole, express the urban intellectual sensibility of the Canadian sixties with a comprehensiveness and finality that her novels don't attain (and don't attempt). If it's true also that Atwood's lyrics, rather than the novels and criticism, are the main prop upon which her critical reputation should rest—upon shorter rather than longer forms, that is—then it should be no surprise to find this a thoroughly challenging and rewarding volume….

Margaret (Eleanor) Atwood 1939– © Lürfi Özkök

[All of the stories] are remarkably approachable—well-crafted, focussed, unfailingly interesting even when not especially brilliant. They're traditional in form, only modestly experimental, unselfconscious realism that now and then pushes unalarmingly into the terrain of serious fantasy or the surreal….

A full selection of Atwood's prose is on display, from straight-forward exposition to Lardneresque monologue to her most characteristic voice—elliptical, flat...