Mavis Gallant

The literary great presents a collection of short stories that focus on the human drama and historical import of Paris and offer a kaleidoscopic portrait of the people and places that create a world within a world. Original.

Paris Stories

Paris Öyküleri

Mavis Gallant is the modern master of what Henry James called the international story, the fine-grained evocation of the quandaries of people who must make their way in the world without any place to call their own. The irreducible complexity of the very idea of home is especially at issue in the stories Gallant has written about Montreal, where she was born, although she has lived in Paris for more than half a century. Varieties of Exile, Russell Banks's extensive new selection from Gallant's work, demonstrates anew the remarkable reach of this writer's singular art. Among its contents are three previously uncollected stories, as well as the celebrated semi-autobiographical sequence about Linnet Muir—stories that are wise, funny, and full of insight into the perils and promise of growing up and breaking loose.

Varieties of Exile

With irony and an unfailing eye for the telling detail, Gallant weaves stories of such intricate simplicity and spare complexity that critics have rightly compared her with Henry James and Anton Chekhov. Readers will discover, or rediscover, the pleasure of reading one of the finest writers of our time.

The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant

Through the eyes of four observers, this novel tells the story of the relationship between a mother, Bonnie, and her daughter, Flor. With Venice and Paris as a backdrop, the frailty of the emotions that connect the characters is exposed through Flor's decline into insanity.

Green Water, Green Sky

Collects lesser-known early works by the prolific modern short-story master and author of Varieties of Exile, in a volume that includes pieces set in Quebec, post-war Europe, and Germany and offers additional insight into her enduring sympathy with excluded and exiled subjects. Original.

Early and Uncollected Stories

The Cost of Living

Garth Risk Hallberg

Mavis Gallant’s extraordinary mastery of the short story remains insufficiently recognized. She may be the best writer of stories since the early-1950s prime of John Cheever, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O’Connor, and even in such august company, her work is sui generis. Gallant’s short fiction refines the art of the story even as it expands the boundaries of what a story can be. Above and beyond that, however, it constitutes a striking, almost avant-garde reduction. To read her is to discover something about the very nature of story: how for better or worse life is caught up in it, and how on the page that common predicament can come to life.

The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant includes more than thirty stories never before gathered into one volume, including “The Accident” and “His Mother” and “An Autobiography” and “Dédé.” With the publication of this book, finally all of this modern master’s fiction will be in print.

The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant

"Meticulously constructed ... timeless and unforgettable..." --Jane Urquhart In the stories that make up In Transit, internationally acclaimed writer Mavis Gallant describes with elegant and scrupulous precision-and a discerning eye for telling detail-the quirks of human nature and the limits of human compassion. A host of remarkably drawn characters are surveyed with a cool wit and sophisticated intelligence as they struggle to transcend the imprisonment of their provisional lives. Sometimes direct, sometimes tantalizingly oblique, Mavis Gallant's finely textured writing demonstrates once again that she is a master of contemporary prose.

Stories

In Transit

In Home Truths, Mavis Gallant draws us into the tricky labyrinth of human behaviour, while offering readers her unique, clear-eyed vision of Canadians both at home and abroad. Ranging in time and place from small-town Quebec during the Depression, to Geneva and Paris in the 1950s, to contemporary Vancouver Island, these stories explore the remorseless cruelty of children, the tensions that affect all families, the dangerous but endearing naïveté of young girls in love with Europe, and the terrible distances that divide people who love each other. And in the celebrated “Linnet Muir” stories, Gallant draws on her own experiences to portray a sensitive and alarmingly perceptive young girl growing up in Montreal in the 1930s and 1940s. Incisive, darkly humorous, and compassionate, Home Truths is a vibrant collection of stories from one of our finest writers.

Home Truths

Twelve stories deal with a young woman planning her wedding, an immature newlywed, Americans traveling in postwar Europe, a vacation cruise, a picnic, and a funeral

The Other Paris

Set in Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War, the nine stories in this glittering collection reflect on the foibles and dilemmas of human relationships. An English family goes to the south of France for the sake of the father’s health, and to get away from an England of rationing and poverty. A displaced person turned French soldier in Algeria now makes a living as an actor in Paris. A group of selfish English expatriates on the Italian Riviera are incredulous that Mussolini and the Germans may affect their lives. A great writer’s quiet widow blossoms in widowhood, to the surprise and alarm of her children, who send a ten-year-old grandson to Switzerland to keep her company one Christmas. Full of wry humour and penetrating insights, this is Mavis Gallant at her most unforgettable.

Penguin Modern Classics Edition

From the Fifteenth District

“In Gallant’s stories, the conflicts, obsessions, and concerns – the near-impossibility of gaining personal freedom without inflicting harm on those whom you love and who love you; the difficulty of forgiving a cruel and selfish parent without sentimentalizing him; or the pain of failed renewal – are limned with an affectionate irony and generated by a sincere belief in their ultimate significance, significance not just for the characters who embody them, but for the author and, presumably, the reader as well.” –Russell Banks, from his introduction Mavis Gallant is the modern master of what Henry James called the international story, the fine-grained evocation of the quandaries of people who must make their way in the world without any place to call their own. The complexity of the very idea of home is alive in the stories Gallant has written about Montreal. Montreal Stories, Russell Banks’s new selection from Gallant’s work demonstrates anew the remarkable reach of this writer’s singular art. Among its contents are three previously unpublished stories, as well as the celebrated semi-autobiographical sequence about Linnet Muir – stories that are wise, funny, and full of insight into the perils and promise of growing up and breaking loose.

Montreal Stories

AN NYRB CLASSICS ORIGINAL Mavis Gallant's novels are as memorable as her renowned short stories. Full of wit and psychological poignancy, A Fairly Good Time, here with Green Water, Green Sky, encapsulates Gallant's unparalleled skill as a storyteller. Shirley Perrigny (n�e Norrington, then briefly Higgins), the heroine of A Fairly Good Time, is an original. Derided by the Parisians she lives among and chided by her fellow Canadians, this young widow--recently remarried to a French journalist named Philippe--is fond of quoting Jane Austen and Kingsley Amis and of using her myopia as a defense against social aggression. As the fixed points in Shirley's life begin to recede--Philippe having apparently though not definitively left--her freewheeling, makeshift, and self-abnegating ways come to seem an aspect of devotion to her fellow man. Could this unreliable protagonist be the unwitting heroine of her own story? Green Water, Green Sky, Gallant's first novel, is a darker tale of the fractured family life of Bonnie McCarthy, an American divorc�e, and her daughter, Flor. Uprooted and unmoored, mother and daughter live like itinerants--in Venice, Cannes, and Paris--glamorous and dependent. With little hope of escape, Flor attempts to flee this untidy life and the false notes of her mother.

With Green Water, Green Sky

A Fairly Good Time

Venecia, Cannes y Paris componen el falsamente glamouroso escenario de la vida de Florence McCarthy Harris, una muchacha americana que pasa su juventud viajando por Europa y viviendo de la caridad de los familiares de la mano de su madre, Bonnie, que, a causa de su divorcio, no podía soportar ya seguir viviendo en América. Mientras asistimos al atribulado descenso a la locura de Flor, serán cuatro las voces que, a modo de un cuadro cubista, se superpondrán y revelarán la realidad fracturada de una joven que es arrastrada por su madre a una vida de movimiento constante en un continente desconocido. Una novela sobre la naturaleza humana que, enmarcada en una enfermiza relación maternofilial, trata con gran delicadeza sobre la necesidad de un hogar y la fragilidad que supone el desarraigo.

Agua verde, cielo verde

In her preface to this book Mavis Gallant describes her life as a writer of fiction: “I still do not know what impels anyone of sound mind to leave dry land and spend a lifetime describing people who do not exist. If it is child’s play, an extension of make-believe–something one is frequently assured by persons who write about writing–how to account for the overriding wish to do that, just that, only that, and consider it as natural an occupation as riding a racing bike over the Alps? Perhaps the cultural attache at a Canadian embassy who said to me ‘Yes, but what do you really do?’ was expressing an adult opinion.” What Mavis Gallant really does is write some of the finest short stories in the English language. She has been doing so since 1950, the year that The New Yorker accepted one of her short stories and changed her life. Over the years, as her stories in book form reached a wider audience she–like Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood–has made Canadian short stories a presence on the world’s literary scene, and on our bestseller lists. Her reputation is best described by the American writer Fran Lebowitz, who recently wrote: “The irrefutable master of the short story in English, Mavis Gallant has, among her colleagues, many admirers, but no peer. She is the standout. She is the standard-bearer. She is the standard.” In tribute to her extraordinary career this elegant 900-page volume brings together the work of her life-time. It contains no fewer than 52 stories written over four decades and grouped according to the periods in which they are set, starting with the 1930s. Predictably, selecting from her work for this volume was no easy task. Writing in praise of Mavis Gallant in 1993, Robertson Davies made an interesting estimate: “She has written many short stories. My calculation suggests that she has written in this form at least the equivalent of twenty novels.” That extraordinary life’s work is well represented here, demonstrating on every page what Alice Adams has called “the astounding precision of her language, the range and generosity of her intelligence, her marvellous wit.” Even Mavis Gallant’s most devoted admirers will find stories here that they do not know, or stories that they rediscover like long-lost friends. For newer admirers this is a treasure trove, a remarkable book by a modern Canadian master that deserves to be read again and again.

The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant

Paris Notebooks

The City of Lights, as seen by one of its greatest citizens and admirers Paris has been inspiring writers for centuries. Its neighborhoods and people make for a never-ending flow of potential stories. Mavis Gallant, Canadian by birth but Parisian since the 1950s, has created an incredibly loving and accomplished tribute to her adoptive home. In this collection, Gallant illustrates the surprising sense of interconnectedness that comes from living in a big city, as characters from one story drift into another, disappearing only to pop up again much later. The book’s longest work depicts a wily art dealer looking to revive his business by “discovering” an obscure painter, despite the fact that the artist is both Canadian and no longer living. Other tales depict the experiences of the Pugh family, as its American relatives attempt to connect with their French roots. Overhead in a Balloon weaves together the threads and experiences of a multitude of Parisians, each story suffused with Gallant’s feel for detail and atmosphere.

Twelve Stories of Paris

Overhead in a Balloon

Travelers, visitors, and expatriates, Gallant's characters have left homes that don't quite suit them. They find themselves in damp Italian villas or Moscow opera houses or Catalan circus arenas or Genevan hospitals, their loves or families on the verge of crumbling if not already lost. Most will survive, but in the moments the author chooses to describe them they are desperately blind to their errors of judgment or their quiet tragedies. Gallant, Canadian-born but a Parisian since 1950, is a master of short story form and style; her language avoids flourishes for real craft, and her wisdom is often astounding.

Mavis Gallant

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