The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant

Praise

“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

“It’s a truth not often-enough acknowledged that Mavis Gallant is a wonder of the literary world…. Her voice and sensibility are penetrating, canny, graceful and incisive.” —Joan Frank, The Washington Post

“Her body of work is unique and profound; I don’t think there will be another quite like her.” —Jhumpa Lahiri

“Gallant’s talent is as versatile and witty as it is somber and empathetic.” —John Updike

“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.” —Francine Prose, The New Yorker

“Gallant’s craft and empathy are always ahead of us. It is only when we reread her that we discover how, before we know it, she will have circled a person, captured a voice, revealed a whole manner of a life in the way a character avoids an issue or discusses a dress.” —Michael Ondaatje

“Perhaps . . . her greatest gift, beyond her masterful prose and the delicious bite of her dialogue [is] that she makes you feel that you are remembering something from an earlier life, and when you finish her stories, you must return to your own drab existence.” —Brandon Taylor, Electric Literature

“The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant . . . brings together more than 30 stories by the post-WWII Canadian master, including ‘The Accident’ (1967), about Americans abroad who face death and reinvent themselves.” —David Varno, Publishers Weekly, Fall 2024 Adult Preview longlist

“Mavis Gallant’s stories—intricate, vivid, often hallucinatory—are series of mirrored prisms; each facet catches the light but throws it aslant.” —Cynthia Zarin, Book Post

“Each [story] is so good that you have to pace yourself, recalling Gallant’s own admonition in her introduction to the Everyman edition of her Collected Stories: ‘Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.’”
—Tessa Hadley, London Review of Books