Varieties of Exile

By Mavis Gallant
Selected and with an introduction by Russell Banks

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.

Read the introduction (PDF)

Reviews

When beginning one of [Gallant's] stories I feel that I must already be running along a platform, willing to leap onto a moving train. Her ''Collected Stories,'' which I received for Christmas in 1997, was what I read religiously and almost exclusively during a long winter of writing in Provincetown, Mass. ... What I adore about her, and wish to bring to my own pages, is the sheer vigor and velocity of her writing, the bombardment of detail that is always relevant, the characters who are not simply three-dimensional but 30-dimensional, addled and contradictory and hateful and endearing all at once.
— Jhumpa Lahiri

I have read Mavis Gallant with the greatest admiration for the past forty years. The astounding precision of her language, the range and generosity of her intelligence, her marvelous wit—all combine to make her one of our three or four best living short-story writers.
— Alice Adams

Gallant's subject is the comic opera of character.... 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

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, Harper's

She has radically reshaped the short story for decade after decade.
— The New York Times

Also see:

Paris Stories By Mavis Gallant Selected and with an introduction by Michael Ondaatje 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.

The Cost of Living By Mavis Gallant Introduction by Jhumpa Lahiri An original collection of stories—many originally published in The New Yorker—from a woman widely considered to be one of the most thrilling practitioners of the genre. Gallant's tales of exile and displacement are admired by Margaret Atwood, Deborah Eisenberg, Michael Ondaatje, Russell Banks, and others.

Sign up for our free email newsletters for updates and special offers on NYRB books.