Mavis Gallant

Born in Montreal to an English father and an American mother, Gallant was shuffled among some seventeen schools after her father's early death and her mother's remarriage, a rootless childhood she later credited as the source of her fiction's recurring subject: people cut loose from any stable home.

After years as a journalist at the Montreal Standard, she moved to Paris alone in 1950 on the strength of a single accepted story, resolving to live by fiction alone. The New Yorker published her almost exclusively for the next five decades, effectively her only editorial home, as she built a body of stories about refugees, war orphans, and expatriates adrift across postwar Europe.

Her prose achieved a cool, exact irony that critics compared to Chekhov's, rendering displacement without ever asking for pity. Paris Stories, the 2002 NYRB Classics selection assembled late in her life, introduced American readers who had missed her in the magazine to a body of work Michael Ondaatje called one of the great achievements of the short story form.