Mavis Gallant is a contemporary legend, a frequent contributor to the New Yorker for close to fifty years, and the undisputed master of the short story. Her peerless prose captures the range of human experience while evoking time and place with unequaled skill. This superb collection of fifteen of Gallant's stories, edited and with an introduction by bestselling author Michael Ondaatje, gathers the best of her many stories set all over Europe, all written in Paris where she 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.
Besides an introduction by Michael Ondaatje, this book includes the following stories:
"The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street"
"Irina"
"The Latehomecomer"
"In Transit"
"The Moslem Wife"
"From the Fifteenth District"
"Speck's Idea"
"Baum, Gabriel, 1935-( )"
"The Remission"
"Grippes and Poches"
"Forain"
"August"
"Mlle. Dias de Corta"
"In Plain Sight"
"Scarves, Beads, Sandals"
Afterword: About the Stories, by Mavis Gallant
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"This book was listed at the back of Francine Prose's How to Read Like a Writer. Years ago I added the first page or two of suggested reading from Prose's list to my Amazon Wishlist. Last Christmas someone gave me Gallant's Paris Stories and I've only now read all the stories in the collection. I'm not certain I've read more beautiful, direct declaritive sentences. Gallant's prose is so clean it's perfect. Her ability to slip from one character's thoughts to another's, sometimes within the same sentence, is startling and refreshing and entertaining. These stories inspire the imagination; they make me want to write. Some are humorous, others tragic; all reach a level of care and coherency that make the act of reading them one of heightened senses, of an almost anxious pleasure which pleads for them not to end, for the sentences to keep living and breathing with each exact word, each shiny, perfect step forward. Read The Moslem Wife. Read them all, and then find copies of her many collections and read those too. That is my plan."
—
Michael (5 out of 5 stars)