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Sep 10, 2002 | ISBN 9780375758225 Buy
Dec 18, 2007 | ISBN 9780307431240 Buy
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Available from:
Sep 10, 2002 | ISBN 9780375758225
Dec 18, 2007 | ISBN 9780307431240
When Mary Ladd Gavell died in 1967, at the age of forty-seven, she had never been published. But her story “The Rotifer” was fortuitously discovered by John Updike, who called it a “gem” and included it in The Best American Short Stories of the Century. With the publication of I Cannot Tell a Lie, Exactly, Mary Ladd Gavell takes her rightful place among the best writers of her—and our—time.
It is the stuff of fiction: A collection of stories, never made public, is lost in a drawer for thirty years until, miraculously, the stories are discovered and published. It is also the true story of the book you are holding in your hands.Mary Ladd Gavell died in 1967 at the age of forty-seven, having published nothing in her lifetime. She was the managing editor of Psychiatry magazine in Washington, D.C., and after her death, her colleagues ran her story "The Rotifer" in the magazine as a tribute. The story was, somehow, plucked from that nonliterary journal and selected for The Best American Short Stories 1967. And again, thirty-three years later, "The Rotifer" emerged from near obscurity when John Updike selected it for The Best American Short Stories of the Century. In his Introduction to that collection, Updike called Gavell’s story a "gem" and said that her writing was "feminism in literary action.""The Rotifer" has remained, until now, Gavell’s only published work.The sixteen stories collected here include the anthologized classic "The Rotifer," in which a young woman learns the extent to which a bit of innocent interference, or the refusal to interfere, can change the course of lives. "The Swing" depicts a mother’s strange reconnection to her adult son’s childhood as she is summoned outside, night after night, by the creak of his old swing. "Baucis" introduces a woman longing for widowhood who is cheated of the respite she craves and whose last words are tragically misunderstood by her family. The title story, based on the last-minute announcement by Gavell’s own son that he was in a school play, is infused with the gentle humor and vivid insights that make all of Mary Ladd Gavell’s stories timeless and utterly beguiling.With the publication of I Cannot Tell a Lie, Exactly, Mary Ladd Gavell takes her rightful place among the best writers of her, and our, time.
Mary Ladd Gavell was born in Cuero, Texas, in 1919 and graduated from Texas A&M University in 1940. She married Stefan Gavell in 1953, and the couple had two sons. They lived in Washington, D.C., where Mary Gavell worked at… More about Mary Ladd Gavell
“Everyone should have this book on their shelf…for the pleasure of reading a perfect story again and again.”—Chicago Sun-Times“[Stories of] wives, mothers and daughters who know more than they say and subtly question the conventional surfaces of their lives…In her best work, Gavell’s prose is both light and deep, wry, with a quick, sharp edge.”—The New York Times Book Review“Like Grace Paley, Gavell takes the slice-of-life incident and transforms it into something more…with resonance and meaning.”—San Francisco Chronicle“Her stories made the ordinary compelling and often jabbed the sad and serious with an elbow of humor….[I Cannot Tell a Lie, Exactly] helps elevate the short story to a national art form.”—The Seattle Times“Replete with an understated wisdom and humor that make one regret that the book will have no encore.”—Time Out New York“Each [story] is a perfect gem….John Updike selected ‘The Rotifer’ for The Best American Short Stories of the Century, but any of the pieces in [this] collection could be rightly chosen for this honor.”—BookPage
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