Books by Mavis Gallant
The Wandering Jews
The classic portrait of a vanished people. Every few decades a book is published that shapes Jewish consciousness. One thinks of Wiesel's Night or Levi's Survival in Auschwitz. But in 1927, years before these works were written, Joseph Roth (1894-1939) composed The Wandering Jews. In these stunning dispatches written when Roth was a correspondent in Berlin during the whirlwind period of Weimar Germany, he warned of the false comforts of Jewish assimilation, laid bare the schism between Eastern and Western Jews, and at times prophesied the horrors posed by Nazism. The Wandering Jews remains as vital today as when it was first published. "[A] book of impassioned reportage and polemic...it is impossible not to feel a sympathetic wonder."―Michael Andre Bernstein, The New Republic "In these disturbing yet strikingly illuminating pages, the truth of Jewish destiny from long ago vibrates and sings..."―Elie Wiesel "No other writer...has come so close to achieving the wholeness that Lukacs cites as our impossible aim."―Nadine Gordimer "What a marvelous writer! Read him now. You can thank me later."―Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World
"[C]aptures and encapsulates Europe in those uncertain hours before the upheaval of a continent and the annihilation of a civilization."―Cynthia Ozick, author of Quarrel and Quandary "[A] writer well worth adding to the short list of giants such as Thomas Mann, Elie Wiesel, and Primo Levi."―Hadassah Magazine, Sanford Pinsker
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The Wandering Jews
This first English translation of nonfiction by journalist-novelist Roth (d. 1939) incisively portrays pre-World War II European Jewish experience. Includes the 1937 preface for the never published German second edition of Juden auf Wanderschaft (c.1926), comment by Elie Wiesel, and several period photos. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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Paris Notebooks: Essays & Reviews (Nonpareil Books)
“A superb collection...Page after page, Gallant dazzles. Her voice and sensibility are penetrating, canny, graceful, and incisive.”—Washington Post
Best of the Year from Our Pages—The New Yorker
Enthralling essays on the expatriate experience in Paris and shrewd literary criticism by one of the twentieth century’s finest writers.
Mavis Gallant is revered as one of the great short story writers of her generation, but she was also an astute observer and formidable reporter. This selection of Gallant’s essays and reviews written between 1968 and 1985 begins with her impressions of the Parisian student uprising in May 1968. Originally published in The New Yorker, “The Events in May” inspired Wes Anderson’s film The French Dispatch and Gallant herself served as inspiration for the journalist portrayed by Frances McDormand.
Paris Notebooks presents a whole range of subjects portraying French society, ranging from architecture and literature to the gripping story of Gabrielle Russier, a young French schoolteacher driven to imprisonment, madness, and suicide as the result of an affair with one of her students. Also included are Gallant’s astute reviews of books by major figures such as Vladimir Nabokov, Simone de Beauvoir, Colette, and Günter Grass. No matter what form she’s working in, Mavis Gallant’s flawless prose is always full of wit and acuity.
This Nonpareil edition includes a new introduction by acclaimed literary biographer Hermione Lee.
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$18.95
Paris Stories (New York Review Books Classics)
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.
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Varieties of Exile (New York Review Books Classics)
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.
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A Fairly Good Time and Green Water, Green Sky (New York Review Books Classics)
AN NYRB CLASSICS ORIGINAL
Mavis Gallant’s novels are as memorable as her renowned short stories. Full of wit and psychological poignancy, A Fairly Good Time, here with Green Water, Green Sky, encapsulates Gallant’s unparalleled skill as a storyteller.
Shirley Perrigny (née Norrington, then briefly Higgins), the heroine of A Fairly Good Time, is an original. Derided by the Parisians she lives among and chided by her fellow Canadians, this young widow—recently remarried to a French journalist named Philippe—is fond of quoting Jane Austen and Kingsley Amis and of using her myopia as a defense against social aggression. As the fixed points in Shirley’s life begin to recede—Philippe having apparently though not definitively left—her freewheeling, makeshift, and self-abnegating ways come to seem an aspect of devotion to her fellow man. Could this unreliable protagonist be the unwitting heroine of her own story?
Green Water, Green Sky, Gallant’s first novel, is a darker tale of the fractured family life of Bonnie McCarthy, an American divorcée, and her daughter, Flor. Uprooted and unmoored, mother and daughter live like itinerants—in Venice, Cannes, and Paris—glamorous and dependent. With little hope of escape, Flor attempts to flee this untidy life and the false notes of her mother.
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The Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories (New York Review Books Classics)
A New York Review Books Original
Mavis Gallant is renowned as one of the great short-story writers of our day. This new gathering of long-unavailable or previously uncollected work presents stories from 1951 to 1971 and shows Gallant's progression from precocious virtuosity, to accomplished artistry, to the expansive innovatory spirit that marks her finest work.
"Madeleine's Birthday," the first of Gallant's many stories to be published in The New Yorker, pairs off a disaffected teenager, abandoned by her social-climbing mother, with a complacent middle-aged suburban housewife, in a subtly poignant comedy of miscommunication that reveals both characters to be equally adrift. "The Cost of Living," the extraordinary title story, is about a company of strangers, shipwrecked over a chilly winter in a Parisian hotel and bound to one another by animosity as much as by unexpected love.
Set in Paris, New York, the Riviera, and Montreal and full of scrupulously observed characters ranging from freebooters and malingerers to runaway children and fashion models, Gallant's stories are at once satirical and lyrical, passionate and skeptical, perfectly calibrated and in constant motion, brilliantly capturing the fatal untidiness of life.
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The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant
A collection of over thirty short stories by one of the greatest fiction writers in American history, now available in a single volume for the first time ever.
The immensity of Gallant's achievement still seems insufficiently recognized. Alice Munro's Nobel notwithstanding, Gallant may in fact have been the best pure story writer since the early-1950s prime of Cheever, Welty, and Flannery O'Connor, and even in such august company, Gallant's stories are sui generis. They do something different than perfecting the tradition or stretching the boundaries of what the form can do. For all their expansiveness, Gallant's stories constitute a striking and almost avant-garde reduction: in reading her, one feels like they discover something about what a short story really is and isn't—about what is necessary, and what is sufficient.
The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant includes over thirty stories never before collected in one volume, including "The Accident" and "His Mother" and "An Autobiography" and "Dedé." With the publication of this book, finally all of this modern master's fiction will be in print.
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The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant: Introduction by Francine Prose (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series)
This generous collection of fifty-two stories, selected from across her prolific career by the author, includes a preface in which she discusses the sources of her art.
A widely admired master of the short story, Mavis Gallant was a Canadian-born writer who lived in France and died in 2014 at the age of ninety-one. Her more than one hundred stories, most published in The New Yorker over five decades beginning in 1951, have influenced generations of writers and earned her comparisons to Anton Chekhov, Henry James, and George Eliot. She has been hailed by Michael Ondaatje as “one of the great story writers of our time.”
With irony and an unfailing eye for the telling detail, Gallant weaves stories of spare complexity, often pushing the boundaries of the form in boldly unconventional directions. The settings in The Collected Stories range from Paris to Berlin to Switzerland, from the Italian Riviera to the Côte d’Azur, and her characters are almost all exiles of one sort or another, as she herself was for most of her expatriate life. The wit and precision of her prose, combined with her expansive view of humanity, provide a rare and deep reading pleasure. With breathtaking control and compression, Gallant delivers a whole life, a whole world, in each story.
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