Paris Stories
Paris Stories

Author: Mavis Gallant

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2011-04-27

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 1590174224

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A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS ORIGINAL Mavis Gallant is a contemporary legend, a frequent contributor to The New Yorkerfor close to fifty years who has, in the words of The New York Times, "radically reshaped the short story for decade after decade." Michael Ondaatje's new selection of Gallant's work gathers some of the most memorable of her stories set in Europe and Paris, where Gallant has long lived. Mysterious, funny, insightful, and heartbreaking, these are tales of expatriates and exiles, wise children and straying saints. Together they compose a secret history, at once intimate and panoramic, of modern times.

Varieties of Exile
Varieties of Exile

Author: Mavis Gallant

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2003-11-30

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 9781590170601

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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.

Across the Bridge
Across the Bridge

Author: Mavis Gallant

Publisher: Open Road Media

Published: 2014-12-16

Total Pages: 161

ISBN-13: 1497685087

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A New York Times Best Book of the Year: Short stories centered around a French Canadian family that relocates to Paris in the years before WWII. One of the greatest strengths of Mavis Gallant’s writing is her ability to distill a character’s emotions into a simple moment—a lingering glance or an unuttered word. Her flair for detail is everywhere in evidence in Across the Bridge, studies of Montreal and Paris over the last century. The primary focus of this story collection is the Carettes, a family of French Canadians who relocate to Paris before World War II. The two daughters, Marie and Berthe, could not be more different: Marie is traditional and quiet while Berthe is strong willed and open minded. But as they grow together, the two learn how much they truly have in common. Accompanying these stories of the Carettes are tales of growth and isolation at home and abroad, including one of a rebellious French-speaking Canadian girl growing up in the Anglophone area of the city. Another entry is focused on an anthropologist who, on a trip to a small country, finds a group of people who speak a language no one has ever heard before. Unfortunately, when he announces his discovery, no one believes him. Gallant writes “elegant, witty tales of place and person” and cannily observes small domestic moments as her characters create and destroy the illusions in their lives (Library Journal).

The Cost of Living
The Cost of Living

Author: Mavis Gallant

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2009-09-29

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 1590173279

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A New York Review Books Original Mavis Gallant is renowned as one of the great short-story writers of our day. This new gathering of long-unavailable or previously uncollected work presents stories from 1951 to 1971 and shows Gallant's progression from precocious virtuosity, to accomplished artistry, to the expansive innovatory spirit that marks her finest work. "Madeleine's Birthday," the first of Gallant's many stories to be published in The New Yorker, pairs off a disaffected teenager, abandoned by her social-climbing mother, with a complacent middle-aged suburban housewife, in a subtly poignant comedy of miscommunication that reveals both characters to be equally adrift. "The Cost of Living," the extraordinary title story, is about a company of strangers, shipwrecked over a chilly winter in a Parisian hotel and bound to one another by animosity as much as by unexpected love. Set in Paris, New York, the Riviera, and Montreal and full of scrupulously observed characters ranging from freebooters and malingerers to runaway children and fashion models, Gallant's stories are at once satirical and lyrical, passionate and skeptical, perfectly calibrated and in constant motion, brilliantly capturing the fatal untidiness of life.

Going Ashore
Going Ashore

Author: Mavis Gallant

Publisher: Emblem Editions

Published: 2010-04-06

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 155199366X

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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” 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 twentieth 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.

From The Fifteenth District
From The Fifteenth District

Author: Mavis Gallant

Publisher: Emblem Editions

Published: 2011-06-22

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 1551996278

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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.

Montreal Stories
Montreal Stories

Author: Mavis Gallant

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart

Published: 2011-05-18

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 1551996294

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“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.

The Moslem Wife and Other Stories
The Moslem Wife and Other Stories

Author: Mavis Gallant

Publisher: New Canadian Library

Published: 2011-06-01

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 1551996324

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Internationally celebrated as among the finest stories written in English today, Mavis Gallant's fiction offers a penetrating and powerful vision of contemporary human relationships in Europe and North America. The Moslem Wife and Other Stories brings together eleven of Gallant's best stories from over three decades. These embody the beauty, irony, and compassion of a master writer's fictional universe. Amid the complex perceptions of the past that haunt her characters, Gallant deploys her sharp comic eye to superb effect: in the figures who move through her stories, we catch troubling, fleeting glimpses of our own lives. Selected and with an afterword by Mordecai Richler.

The Pegnitz Junction
The Pegnitz Junction

Author: Mavis Gallant

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart

Published: 2011-05-18

Total Pages: 191

ISBN-13: 1551996332

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In these dazzling stories, Mavis Gallant immerses us in the lives of ordinary people swept up in the upheaval and displacement that followed in the wake of the Second World War. A bitter yet stubbornly pragmatic woman prepares for what promises to be another disastrous Christmas with her mother, her aunt, and her would-be-war-hero uncle. Engaged to another man, a woman travels to Paris with her older lover and his young son. A wife recollects her complicated relationship with the refugee woman who had a brief affair with her husband. Small mercies form the backbone of a friendship between an actress and a police commissioner. A career soldier, now discharged and stranded in France, makes his first adjustments to life as a civilian. In elegant, diamond-sharp prose, Gallant distills the vanities, absurdities, and contradictions that lie at the heart of human behavior and fashions stories of rare power and insight.