Paris Stories

Начало книги

MAVIS GALLANT was born in Montreal in August of 1922. After a peripatetic childhood (she attended seventeen schools), she found a job with the National Film Board of Canada, and then at the Montreal Standard as a journalist. In 1944 she published her first stories, and six years later, determined to become a fulltime writer, she moved to Paris, where she has lived ever since. Paris seems to be her home in every way, emotionally, spiritually, physically, although she is still very much a Canadian who is living abroad.

In the last fifty years her publications have included several collections of short stories, two novels, works of nonfiction such as Paris Notebooks, which covered the student uprisings of l968, novellas, plays, and literary essays. Her stories and nonfiction have for years appeared regularly in The New Yorker. And she has won many distinguished literary awards. Still, at present in the United States, her work is not even in print, while her reputation and readership are smaller than she deserves, though among writers she is a shared and loved and daunting secret. I know two writers who have told me that the one writer they do not read when they are completing a book is Mavis Gallant. Nothing could be more intimidating. “The long career of Marguerite Yourcenar,” Mavis Gallant once wrote, “stands among the litter of flashier reputations as testimony to… the purpose and meaning of a writer's life.” One feels the remark is an apt description of Gallant's own accomplishment.

Читать дальше →