Paris Stories

By Mavis Gallant
Selected and with an introduction by Michael Ondaatje

A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS ORIGINAL

Mavis Gallant is a contemporary legend, a frequent contributor to The New Yorker for 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 expatriates and exiles, wise children and straying saints. Together they compose a secret history, at once intimate and panoramic, of modern times.

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

Mavis Gallant's finely honed prose captures the small details that illuminate a life.
— Publishers Weekly

Gallant, a master of the short story who breaks every rule of the form, has been a force in the pages of The New Yorker for decades. . . . Gallant is adept at portraying outsiders and dramatizing cultural displacement and the confusion of travel, which is often linked to the muddle of love. There is an obliqueness to the direction of her stories, a teasing irony, and an amazing melding of exterior and interior.
— Booklist

Mrs. Gallant, who has dared to drift in a disorienting century, always trusting her own imaginative compass. Her fiction, never fooled into trying to keep up with history, will last a long time.
— Ann Hulbert, The New York Times Book Review

[It is] easy to recognize straight away that some are perfect—meaning that they work perfectly, without waste or overkill, their pathos creeping up stealthily to deliver a fierce pluck at one's feelings. . . All the stories are sharply funny from time to time, and some of them—not many—all the time. . . She can do all the voices: all the accents and intonations, English, American, East European, German, French; and all the vocabularies, teen-age to senile, trendy to dinosaur, classy to classless, revealing provenance, period, social condition, state of mind. It is calmly done, built into the narrative, with no virtuoso display.
— Gabriele Annan

Also see:

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 qualms and quandaries of people who, whether from choice or necessity, have no place to call home.

Masters of the Short Story Collection Love in a Fallen City, White Walls, Paris Stories, and Randall Jarrell's Book of Stories

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.

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