This generous collection of fifty-two stories, selected from across her
prolific career by the author, includes a preface in which she discusses
the sources of her art.
A widely admired master of the short story, Mavis Gallant was a
Canadian-born writer who lived in France and died in 2014 at the age of
ninety-one. Her more than one hundred stories, most published in The
New Yorker over five decades beginning in 1951, have influenced
generations of writers and earned her comparisons to Anton Chekhov,
Henry James, and George Eliot. She has been hailed by Michael Ondaatje
as "one of the great story writers of our time."
With irony and an unfailing eye for the telling detail, Gallant weaves
stories of spare complexity, often pushing the boundaries of the form in
boldly unconventional directions. The settings in The Collected
Stories range from Paris to Berlin to Switzerland, from the Italian
Riviera to the Côte d'Azur, and her characters are almost all exiles of
one sort or another, as she herself was for most of her expatriate life.
The wit and precision of her prose, combined with her expansive view of
humanity, provide a rare and deep reading pleasure. With breathtaking
control and compression, Gallant delivers a whole life, a whole world,
in each story.