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

Eight Stories and a Short Novel

My Heart is Broken

One of the world’s great short-story writers emerges with a selection of stories from her past, a trove of hidden treasures. Mavis Gallant moved from Montreal to Paris in 1950 to write short stories for a living. Since then she has continued to write, producing a remarkable body of work. In 1993, Robertson Davies said: “She has written many short stories. My calculation suggests that she has written in this form at least the equivalent of twenty novels.” Many of her stories have been anthologized, notably in the 1996 classic Selected Stories, from which hundreds of pages had to be cut for reasons of length. These “embarrassment of riches” stories are restored in this collection, along with many other neglected treasures from her past. Arranged in the order in which they appeared, they shed light on people living through most of the second half of the 20th century. More important, they show one of the greatest short-story writers of our time at work, delineating a series of worlds with dramatic flair, dazzlingly precise language, a wicked wit, and a vivid understanding of the human condition. Even Mavis Gallant’s most devoted admirers will find many stories here that they do not know. For newer admirers, this will prove to be a wonderful source of constant pleasure, leaving only the great mystery: How does she do it?

Going Ashore

Twelve stories deal with writers, parents, art dealers, tenants, drifters and a manipulative older woman

Twelve Stories of Paris

Overhead in a Balloon

Just as in her fiction, Mavis Gallant is a brilliant observer in her assessments of contemporary headlines, of sociology and mass psychology, of the national character and in her witty, often devastating critiques of other writers.

Mavis Gallant

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