Today word came that Mavis Gallant has died, in Paris, at the age of ninety-one. Gallant published a hundred and sixteen short stories in The New Yorker. Often, her fiction drew its energy from contradictory qualities: her stories were minutely observed but also suspenseful, matter-of-fact but also fanciful, reportorial but also imaginative. They were broad-minded, and so felt real. “From the Fifteenth District,” published in 1978, is a ghost story in which ghosts file police reports about being “haunted” by the living. And yet it feels as concrete as anything you might read in the newspaper or see with your own eyes. Gallant had a rare gift: a solid imagination.
Here’s a small selection of Gallant’s stories from our archives. In 2012, the magazine published a selection from Gallant’s diaries; last year, Margaret Atwood read Gallant’s “Voices Lost in Snow” on our fiction podcast and, in 2007, Antonya Nelson read “When We Were Nearly Young.”
“In Italy,” February 25, 1956 (available for non-subscribers)
“In Transit,” August 14, 1965
“The Rejection,” April 12, 1969
“The Four Seasons,” June 16, 1975
“Varieties of Exile,” January 19, 1976
“From the Fifteenth District,” October 30, 1978
“Grippes and Poche,” November 29, 1982
“Overhead in a Balloon,” July 2, 1984
“Across the Bridge,” March 18, 1991
(Read our Postscript for Mavis Gallant, by Deborah Treisman, the magazine’s fiction editor.) _
Photograph by Neville Elder/Corbis
