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Book Summary and Reviews of The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant by Mavis Gallant

The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant by Mavis Gallant

The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant

by Mavis Gallant

  • Published:
  • Jan 2025, 624 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

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.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"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

This information about The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

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Author Information

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. 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.

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