In stories of astonishing compression and insight, Mavis Gallant wrote of characters severed from their home, exiles disconnected from each other and from themselves. Tracing the fault lines of the post-war world in the intimate lives of her characters, she could conjure an entire worldview in a telling gesture or passing comment.This new volume, selected and introduced by Tessa Hadley, collects the finest work from across Gallant's career. Here are stories of young men returning from wartime internment to changed families, snobbish social climbers haunted by the words of their downtrodden colleagues, and children peering through glass at the secrets and infidelities of their parents. Complex, moving and painfully true, they secure her position among the world's great short story writers.



Mavis Gallant (1922-2014) was born in Montreal and worked as a journalist before moving to Europe to devote herself to writing fiction. After traveling extensively she settled in Paris, where she lived until her death, though she never renounced her Canadian citizenship. Starting in 1951, 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.Tessa Hadley is the author of eight highly praised novels and three collections of stories. She won the Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction in 2016, The Past won the Hawthornden Prize for 2016, and 'Bad Dreams' won the 2018 Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker.



Mavis Gallant's insights into her characters are achieved with breathtaking economy and rightness of detail. She is a terrifyingly good writer



Compulsively readable and deeply memorable... Inimitable



One of the great short-story writers of our time



Vital and lively... Gallant's language is precise and often funny... A wonderful writer



The literary sensation of 2025... the exquisite stories she left behind place her among the greats



A vital introduction to one of the greatest short-story writers... merciless comedy and flinty compassion



Gallant writes such sumptuous sentences, her perception is so original



Gallant is one of the last century's champion short story writers... Her short fictions have the amplitude, if not of a novel, at least of a novella



An exceptional short story writer... The 16 sophisticated tales gathered here beautifully capture the elegance and economy of her prose



The irrefutable master of the short story in English, Mavis Gallant has, among her colleagues, many admirers but no peer. She is the standout. She is the standard-bearer. She is the standard



[Gallant's stories] are their own genre in a way; they are so much richer, so much denser than so many novels... Her body of work is unique and profound; I don't think there will be another quite like her



Gallant always surprised us, she never bothered with the dramatically obvious. As a writer she was beholden to no one. And for a writer whose stories could be dark and misanthropic, it is remarkable to see how many of them are also gently, continually funny



Unblinkingly attentive and keen-eyed . . . Wise, dry, funny, and subtle



Luminescent, subtle and lasting. Gallant's chronicles of internal and external exile are a fitting tribute to a diasporic century



Gallant's work reminds you to think more deeply about the people you deal with . . . She reminds us of how fathomless we are, how there is always more to know



One of the most brilliant story writers in the language, who deserves to be read as widely as her fellow Canadian Alice Munro. No one writes about brutish people like Gallant; she transforms the meanest human specimens into subjects of high fascination and sympathy



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