The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant
Mavis Gallant · 1996
Gallant spent most of her life in Paris writing for The New Yorker, and her expatriate stories about displaced Canadians, European refugees, and the stateless are the finest things of their kind. Criminally underread.
The case against
Nine hundred pages of expatriates in pensions and borrowed flats, observed with an irony that never once warms. Gallant herself advised reading one story at a time and closing the book; ignore that and the detachment begins to feel like cruelty, hers and then yours. Nothing resolves. People drift, misunderstand each other, and the next story begins.
Short Stories · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
if this one calls to you, so will these →
