Dancing Girls (short story collection)

First edition cover

Dancing Girls is a collection of short stories by Canadian author Margaret Atwood, originally published in 1977 by McClelland & Stewart,^[1] Toronto. It was the winner of the St. Lawrence Award for Fiction and the award of The Periodical Distributors of Canada for Short Fiction.

The collection’s fourteen stories feature ordinary people, including a farmer, a birdwatcher, an author, a mother and a travel agent, and their inevitably biased perceptions of the world.^[2]

Stories

Editions based on the original 1977 McClelland & Stewart edition contain the following fourteen stories:

• "The War in the Bathroom"
• "The Man from Mars"
• "Polarities"
• "Under Glass"
• "The Grave of the Famous Poet"
• "Rape Fantasies"
• "Hair Jewellery"
• "When it Happens"
• "A Travel Piece"
• "The Resplendent Quetzal"
• "Training"
• "Lives of the Poets"
• "Dancing Girls"
• "Giving Birth"

Editions based on the revised Simon & Schuster 1982 edition contain the following fourteen stories:

• "The Man from Mars"
• "Betty"
• "Polarities"
• "Under Glass"
• "The Grave of the Famous Poet"
• "Hair Jewellery"
• "When it Happens"
• "A Travel Piece"
• "The Resplendent Quetzal"
• "Training"
• "Lives of the Poets"
• "Dancing Girls"
• "The Sin Eater"
• "Giving Birth"

This effectively swaps "The War in the Bathroom" and "Rape Fantasies" for "Betty" and "The Sin Eater".

References