In Transit: Twenty Stories - Hardcover

Gallant, Mavis

3.88

123 ratings by Goodreads

9780394575759: In Transit: Twenty Stories

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 039457575X ISBN 13: 9780394575759

Publisher: Random House, 1989

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

In this, her ninth collection of short stories, the author of "Overhead in a Balloon" attempts to describe with precision the quirks of human nature and the limits of compassion. A host of characters are surveyed as they struggle to transcend the imprisonment of their provisional lives.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

Mavis Gallant (1922–2014) once told an interviewer that she could no more stop being Canadian than she could change the colour of her eyes. Born in Montreal, she left a career as a leading journalist in that city to move to Paris in 1950 to write.

She published stories on a regular basis in The New Yorker, many of which were anthologized. Her worldwide reputation was 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 she published Across the Bridge and was the recipient of a special tribute at the Harbourfront International Festival of Authors in Toronto. She received several honorary degrees from Canadian universities and remained a much sought-after public speaker.

From Publishers Weekly:

Twenty stories that first appeared in the New Yorker' s golden era of the 1950s and '60s are gathered for the first time in this brilliant collection. Gallant ( Home Truths ; Paris Notebooks ) is one of the great short story writers of our time, and these three groups of stories--"Parents and Children," "Youth, Pursuit and Various Entanglements" and "Relatives, Friends and Adult Confusion"--represent the extraordinary diversity of her endlessly revealing fictions. Her details are always entertaining. "I liked it when we first came over to France and lived right in Versailles," reminisces one of her odd characters in "Malcolm and Bea." "It was more like home." But while the odd remark or the telling observation polishes the surfaces of these stories, it is the author's unique summoning of those truth-telling moments at the intersections of life that charge them with significance. Gallant is a quietly dazzling writer, and it is tempting to pronounce this volume perfect.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.