The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant
Gallant spent most of her life in Paris writing for The New Yorker, and her expatriate stories about displaced Canadians, European refugees, and the stateless are the finest things of their kind. Criminally underread.
Size is the complaint that swallows every other opinion about this collection: reported at anywhere from 887 to nearly 1200 pages depending on edition, with readers describing the read taking six months or longer. Ignore Gallant's own preface, which explicitly warns against reading straight through, and the stories start to blur, with one reader admitting “reading so much of her at one go was too much” and another saying “only a handful of stories here interested me.” Even sympathetic readers concede she “used language well, but she wasn't a very engaging story teller,” impressive on the sentence level without always gripping. Some argue the complete-works format is the wrong way to meet her, and that a slimmer curated selection would serve new readers better than this doorstop.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
