About the Author

Born in Montreal in 1922, Mavis Gallant left a career as a leading journalist in that city to move to Paris in 1950 to write.

Since that time she has been publishing stories on a regular basis in The New Yorker, many of which have been anthologized. Her world-wide reputation has been established by books such as From the Fifteenth District and Home Truths, which won the Governor General's Award in 1982. In that same year she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada, becoming a Companion of the Order in 1993, the year that she published Across the Bridge and was the recipient of a special tribute at the Harbourfront International Festival of Authors in Toronto. In 1996, The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant was published to universal acclaim. Paris Stories, a selection edited by Michael Ondaatje, appeared in 2002, and was followed by the companion volume Montreal Stories, edited by Russell Banks, in 2004.

Gallant is a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She has received several honorary degrees from Canadian universities and remains a much-sought-after public speaker. In 2001 she became the first winner of the Matt Cohen Award, and in 2002 she won the Blue Metropolis International Literary Grand Prix and the Rea Award for the Short Story.

She continues to live in Paris.

From the Hardcover edition.

Reviews

"One of our era's masters of the short story."
-Harper's

"Gallant's subject is the comic opera of character.... 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 "You can start to read any one of Gallant's stories and you are at once swept away - captivated, amazed, moved... She is a fearless writer, apparently equal to representing on paper any aspect of mind or time, however subtle, intractable, or evanescent."
-Jury citation for the Rea Award for the Short Story "Like Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant frequently writes stories that expand like accordions, containing within them entire lives.... These aren't stories to read once; they are stories that demand rereading, and further reading, and which broaden and bloom with each encounter."
-Claire Messud