The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant - (Paperback)

About the Book

"A new collection of stories by Mavis Gallant. Mavis Gallant (1922-2014) was born in Montreal and worked as a journalist at the Montreal Standard before moving to Europe to devote herself to writing fiction. In 1950, after traveling extensively she settled in Paris, where she would remain for the rest of her life. Over the course of her career Gallant published more than one hundred stories and dispatches in The New Yorker. In 2002 she received the Rea Award for the Short Story and in 2004, the PEN/Nabokov Award for lifetime achievement. In addition to A Fairly Good Time, New York Review Books Classics publishes three collections of Gallant's short stories: Paris Stories, Varieties of Exile, and The Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories"--

Book Synopsis

A collection of over thirty short stories by a great modern writer, now available in a single volume for the first time ever.

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.

Review Quotes

"This landmark collection features stories by Canadian writer Gallant not included in her New Yorker-centric Collected Stories. In novelist Hallberg's artful introduction, he explains how encountering Gallant's work restored his faith in fiction, describes her exacting craft, and illuminates the 'wound beneath the cool' that marks so many of her characters. . . . It's an essential addition to any library of 20th-century short fiction." --Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Gallant is the genius absurdist of the 20th century." -- The New York Times

"It's a truth not often-enough acknowledged that Mavis Gallant is a wonder of the literary world.... Her voice and sensibility are penetrating, canny, graceful and incisive." --Joan Frank, The Washington Post

"Her body of work is unique and profound; I don't think there will be another quite like her." --Jhumpa Lahiri

"Gallant's talent is as versatile and witty as it is somber and empathetic." --John Updike

"Line by line, word by word, no one writes with more compression than Gallant. Great short stories are sometimes said to be as rich and as full as novels, but hers are as rich and full as encyclopedias." --Francine Prose, The New Yorker

"Gallant's craft and empathy are always ahead of us. It is only when we reread her that we discover how, before we know it, she will have circled a person, captured a voice, revealed a whole manner of a life in the way a character avoids an issue or discusses a dress." --Michael Ondaatje

"Perhaps . . . her greatest gift, beyond her masterful prose and the delicious bite of her dialogue [is] that she makes you feel that you are remembering something from an earlier life, and when you finish her stories, you must return to your own drab existence." --Brandon Taylor, Electric Literature

"The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant . . . brings together more than 30 stories by the post-WWII Canadian master, including 'The Accident' (1967), about Americans abroad who face death and reinvent themselves." --David Varno, Publishers Weekly, Fall 2024 Adult Preview longlist

"Mavis Gallant's stories--intricate, vivid, often hallucinatory--are series of mirrored prisms; each facet catches the light but throws it aslant." --Cynthia Zarin, Book Post

"Each [story] is so good that you have to pace yourself, recalling Gallant's own admonition in her introduction to the Everyman edition of her Collected Stories 'Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.'"
--Tessa Hadley, London Review of Books

About the Author

Mavis Gallant (1922-2014) was born in Montreal and worked as a journalist at the Montreal Standard before moving to Europe to devote herself to writing fiction. After traveling extensively she settled in Paris, where she lived until her death. The New Yorker published 116 of her stories. She was the recipient of the 2002 Rea Award for the Short Story and the 2004 PEN/Nabokov Award for lifetime achievement. NYRB Classics has published three collections of Gallant's stories: The Cost of Living: The Early and Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant, Paris Stories, and Varieties of Exile as well as a volume containing two novels, A Fairly Good Time and Green Water, Green Sky.

Garth Risk Hallberg is a novelist and critic who resides in New York City with his wife and children. His first novel, City on Fire, was a New York Times and international bestseller, and was named one of the best books of 2015 by The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and Vogue. His essays have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, The Millions, and Slate.