Setting

The events in the short story “Boys and Girls” take place on a fox breeding farm. The father of the main character is a fox farmer. He breeds silver foxes, skins them and sells their fur. The narrator and her smaller brother Laird like watching their father doing skinning work, which he does in the cellar of their house each fall or early winter when the foxes’ fur is prime.

The narrator describes how in bed at the end of the day she can still smell foxes, and that this makes her comfortable. She gives the detailed description how the foxes are penned and cared for, and what the specific chores are that she performs to help her father. For example, she feeds and waters the foxes, rakes the ground around the pens.

   Alice Munro (née Laidlaw) is a Canadian writer primarily known for her short stories. Her first collection of stories was published as Dance of the Happy Shades. In 2009, Munro won the Man Booker International Prize. That same year, she published the short-story collection Too Much Happiness. In 2013, at age 82, Munro was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature.

   Munro's work has been described as having revolutionized the architecture of short stories, especially in its tendency to move forward and backward in time. Munro's fiction is most often set in her native Huron County in southwestern Ontario. Her stories explore human complexities in an uncomplicated prose style. Munro's writing has established her as one of our greatest contemporary writers of fiction.

   The short story "Boys and Girls" was originally published in 1964 and subsequently in Munro's 1968 collection of short stories, Dance of the Happy Shades.

“A story is not like a road to follow … it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.”

― Alice Munro, Selected Stories, 1968-1994

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