In stories of astonishing compression and insight, Mavis Gallant wrote of characters severed from their home, exiles disconnected from each other and from themselves. Tracing the fault lines of the post-war world in the intimate lives of her characters, she could conjure an entire worldview in a telling gesture or passing comment.This new volume, selected and introduced by Tessa Hadley, collects the finest work from across Gallant's career. Here are stories of young men returning f...

An elegant, melancholic novella about memory, family and the meaning of home. This is the tale of the fractured family life of Bonnie McCarthy, a glamorous American divorcée, and her daughter, Flor. Uprooted and unmoored, mother and daughter lead an itinerant existence, with Venice, Cannes and Paris as their backdrop. When Flor attempts to flee this untidy life and the oppressive rule of her eccentric mother, she instead succumbs to a gradual decline into a breakdown. Green Water, Green Sk...

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 sele...

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 co...

With a confidante’s insights, Marta Dvořák sets up an innovative connection between Mavis Gallant’s dazzling writing and the whole spectrum of the arts. She simultaneously engages with the feats of art making and the adventures of reading, looking, and listening.Drawing on private correspondence and conversations with the Gallant she repositionsas a late modernist, Dvořákinvestigates the relationships between the Paris-based master of the short story and visual and sound culture. T...

Shirley Perrigny tiene veintisiete años, es canadiense y vive como expatriada en París. Ha perdido un marido, pero pronto se ha procurado otro, Philippe, un periodista francés de lo más adecuado y exitoso. Despreciada por los parisinos y sermoneada por sus compatriotas canadienses, no puede evitar citar a Jane Austen y Kingsley Amis ante cualquier situación que se le presente. Además, es una experta en utilizar su miopía como arma de defensa contra las agotadoras agresiones sociales que pa...

Mavis Gallant’s only play, which premiered at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre on November 11, 1982, is a comedy that opens in 1942, in the heat of the battle against Fascism, when it was possible for Canadians to cheer for both Stalin and the Royal Family. At home in Montreal, Jenny (18) is impressed by her friend Molly’s copy of a political pamphlet written by V. I. Lenin entitled What Is To Be Done? The two young women are fascinated by the refugees who are flooding into the city from Europe,...

AN NYRB CLASSICS ORIGINALMavis 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 (née 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 C...

A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS ORIGINALMavis 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...

A New York Review Books OriginalMavis 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 disaffec...

Los mejores relatos de una de las grandes cuentistas contemporáneas, a la que Alice Munro consideró su maestra.«Los cuentos de Mavis Gallant son los mejores de nuestro tiempo.»Michael OndaatjeUNO DE LOS MEJORES LIBROS DE 2025 SEGÚN THE NEW YORKER«Los cuentos no son capítulos de una novela. No tendrían que ser leídos de corrido, como si una historia fuera la prolongación de otra. Lean uno, cierren el ...

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 fracturad...