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“... with three polished collections of stories is in much the same fix. I am speaking here of Mavis Gallant, Rachel Ingalls and Grace Paley, all ladies in a world where some of us try hard to be lads,1 and short stories written by ladies are little different from shoes: they need breaking in. During the course of the past two months, I hobbled ...”

“... tales has its own telling decorum. Lust, and Other Stories is only Susan Minot’s second book; Mavis Gallant’s In Transit is part of a much more substantial oeuvre, and collects 20 stories which originally came out in the New Yorker in the Fifties and Sixties. There are eight other volumes of stories as well as two novels, and the new sample ...”

“... beautifully designed, bound and typeset by its publishers – represents the merest sliver of Mavis Gallant’s lifelong achievement. Even discounting the two novels and the books of essays, what we have here can amount to little more than half the content of her nine published short-story collections. Gallant has ...”

“... of stylishness, but no impression at all of a personal style. That could hardly be said of Mavis Gallant, whose stories of Paris are told in a style deliciously personal, a gallant style to be sure, in which sentences develop with the regulated ornamental zeal of the rococo, in measured ...”

“... can be almost slovenly in execution, while the next has the controlled grace of a writer like Mavis Gallant: Berlin is several writers, some raw, some cooked. But more often than not the delivery is stripped down and usually in the first person. Details of character and place are so vivid that the stories feel autobiographical, an impression ...”

“... colony and the latter was uninfluenceable, and hence there was no feedback effect. Why (as Mavis Gallant observes in a short story, ‘Varieties of Exile’) were there no remittance women? Because they would inevitably marry the vigorous independent stock and hence with their remittance would encourage tendencies towards disloyalty. This ...”

“... for selling it. Though now deaf, partially blind and reliant (precariously) on a walker, Mavis remains as jolly and defiant as ever – if not exactly full of her usual beans. Droll but unfair to say of her, as Larkin wrote to a friend about his own aging ma: ‘My mother, not content with being motionless, deaf and speechless, is now going ...”

“... a city was named after her. By the 1920s, her books were right out of fashion, though the names of Mavis and Thelma, popularised by her heroines, lingered on. She has not lacked biographers. The latest to bring her to book, Teresa Ransom, is at pains to probe the mystery about her parentage. First, it is worth revisiting The Sorrows of Satan, which was ...”