Mavis Gallant

Shirley Perrigny tiene veintisiete años, es canadiense y vive en París. Ha perdido un marido, pero pronto se procura otro, Philippe, un periodista adecuado y exitoso. Despreciada por los parisinos y sermoneada por sus compatriotas, no puede evitar citar a Jane Austen y Kingsley Amis en cualquier situacion. Es toda una experta en utilizar su miopia como arma de defensa contra las agresiones sociales que parece no dejar de sufrir. A medida que los pilares que creia inamovibles comienzan a desaparecer, su autentica personalidad sale a luz, y quien antes era victima ahora brota como un radiante espiritu libre, espontanea, abnegada y una fiel e irrefrenable devota por ayudar al projimo. Profunda, divertida y tragica, ¿podria acaso esta nueva protagonista ser la heroina de su propia historia?

Instal·lada al París dels anys seixanta, la Shirley Perrigny és una noia de personalitat singular, que usa la miopia i la literatura com a cuirassa. Ridiculitzada pels parisencs i incompresa per la seva mare, sempre se sent fora de lloc. Despres de quedar vidua per un caprici del desti, es casa amb un periodista esnob i amb poc sentit de lhumor, el Philippe, que aviat labandona i la deixa exposada al seus fantasmes. La Shirley es passara dies esperant-lo, mentre sembolica amb el vei de dalt i mira dajudar diverses amigues en perpetu estat de crisi.En aquesta novel·la exuberant, duna quotidianitat estranya, farcida de detalls densos i espinosos, acompanyem una jove naufraga que recorre la ciutat, guiada pel seu esperit lliure, la seva particular versio del sentit comu i un punt de follia.

Mavis Gallant''s novels are as memorable as her renowned short stories. Full of wit and psychological poignancy, "A Fairly Good Time", here with "Green Water", "Green Sky", encapsulates Gallant s unparalleled skill as a storyteller.Shirley Perrigny (nee Norrington, then briefly Higgins), the heroine of "A Fairly Good Time", is an original. Derided by the Parisians she lives among and chided by her fellow Canadians, this young widow recently remarried to a French journalist named Philippe is fond of quoting Jane Austen and Kingsley Amis and of using her myopia as a defense against social aggression. As the fixed points in Shirley s life begin to recede Philippe having apparently though not definitively left her freewheeling, makeshift, and self-abnegating ways come to seem an aspect of devotion to her fellow man. Could this unreliable protagonist be the unwitting heroine of her own story?"Green Water, Green Sky," Gallant''s first novel, is a darker tale of the fractured familylife of Bonnie McCarthy, an American divorcee, and her daughter, Flor. Uprooted and unmoored, mother and daughter live like itinerants in Venice, Cannes, and Paris glamorous and dependent. With little hope of escape, Flor attempts to flee this untidy life and the false notes of her mother.

Venecia, Cannes y Paris componen el falsamente glamouroso escenario de la vida de Florence McCarthy Harris, una muchacha americana que pasa su juventud viajando por Europa y viviendo de la caridad de los familiares de la mano de su madre, Bonnie, que, a causa de su divorcio, no podia soportar ya seguir viviendo en America. Mientras asistimos al atribulado descenso a la locura de Flor, seran cuatro las voces que, a modo de un cuadro cubista, se superpondran y revelaran la realidad fracturada de una joven que es arrastrada por su madre a una vida de movimiento constante en un continente desconocido. Una novela sobre la naturaleza humana que, enmarcada en una enfermiza relacion maternofilial, trata con gran delicadeza sobre la necesidad de un hogar y la fragilidad que supone el desarraigo.

Cuarenta años después, mayo del 68 sigue siendo un referente histórico e imaginario y, en todo caso, clave para una generación que luego detentaría el poder político y cultural en toda Europa. Mavis Gallant llevo un diario de los acontecimientos de ese tumultuoso mes en Paris que seria publicado en The New Yorker. Asistiendo a manifestaciones y asambleas y observando la vida cotidiana de la gente, pudo comprobar o desmentir lo que decian los rumores, las consignas y los periodicos. Entre gases lacrimogenos y calles levantadas, en un Paris sin transportes ni recogida de basuras, con cortes de electricidad, narra la psicosis de asedio que vivio la ciudad y las manipulaciones a que hechos e ideales se vieron sometidos.

Mavis Gallant is admired and beloved as one of the masters of the modern short story. Selected from early collections and the "New Yorker", where many of the author's stories have appeared over the last fifty years, and with an introduction by Jhumpa Lahiri, "The Cost of Living" reveals a writer coming into her own. The stories span the first twenty years of a long career, from the poise and poignancy of her very first published story, "Madeleine's Birthday" (1951), to the masterly exploration of the passage of time in the long story "The Burgundy Weekend" (1971) that appears here in book form for the first time. Gallant's sensibility has always been cosmopolitan and these stories take us from Quebec to postwar Europe, via New York and New England, before settling, like their author, in Paris. Everywhere the book reveals Gallant's subtly penetrating psychological insight, wit and unsentimental sympathy for the excluded and the exiled, not to mention her wonderfully wicked sense of humour. 'Gallant is one of the great short-story writers of our time' Michael Ondaatje 'The irrefutable master of the short story in English, Mavis Gallant has, among her colleagues, many admirers but no peer. She is the standout. She is the standard-bearer. She is the standar' Fran Lebowitz 'Mavis Gallant is a marvellously clear-headed observer, and a rare phrase-maker' Times Literary Supplement 'Gallant is funny, exacting and stern - in fact, an old-fashioned moralist, luminescent, subtle and lasting. Gallant's chronicles of internal and external exile are a fitting tribute to a diasporic century' Guardian

An elegant, melancholic novellaabout memory, family and the meaning of home.This is the tale of the fractured family life of Bonnie McCarthy, a glamorous American divorcée, and her daughter, Flor. Uprooted and unmoored, mother and daughter lead an itinerant existence, with Venice, Cannes and Paris as their backdrop. When Flor attempts to flee this untidy life and the oppressive rule of her eccentric mother, she instead succumbs to a gradual decline into a breakdown.Green Water, Green Sky was Mavis Gallants debut novel and is a quietly dazzling example of her masterful shifts in narrative perspective and her visceral exploration of displacement and exile.

" Un chef-doeuvre dhumour acéré. " Le Nouvel ObservateurParis, 1963. Shirley, une jeune Canadienne excentrique, a, semble-t-il,un don pour choisir les mauvais maris. Alors que le premier est mortdune tragique chute a bicyclette, le second, un journaliste français,vient de la quitter sans un mot. Errant a travers la ville en attendantson retour, elle multiplie aventures loufoques et rencontresdesopilantes une peintre hysterique et suicidaire, une famille aubord de la crise de nerfs, ou encore le " Grec den haut ", Eros enconge sabbatique.Par lintermediaire de Shirley, heroine ingenue et frondeuse, et gracea son talent indeniable pour le comique de situation, Mavis Gallant,laureate du PEN/Nabokov Award, signe un texte dune ironie a la foismordante et dramatique." Une satire sociale piquante et pleine desprit. " Telerama

Fille dune Américaine divorcée, mondaine et frivole, qui parcourt lEurope dun lieu de villégiature à lautre, Florence na connu que la vie dhôtel. Bien sûr, les hôtels ne manquent pas de charme, et le

Shirley Perrigny tiene veintisiete años, es canadiense y vive como expatriada en París. Ha perdido un marido, pero pronto se ha procurado otro, Philippe, un periodista francés de lo más adecuado y exitoso. Despreciada por los parisinos y sermoneada por sus compatriotas canadienses, no puede evitar citar a Jane Austen y Kingsley Amis ante cualquier situacion que se le presente. Ademas, es una experta en utilizar su miopia como arma de defensa contra las agotadoras agresiones sociales que parece no dejar de sufrir. Felizmente, a medida que las ataduras que creia inalterables comienzan a desaparecer, su autentica personalidad sale a luz, y quien antes era victima ahora abandona su desgracia y de ella brota una radiante mujer llena de cualidades. Espontanea, divertida y a la vez tragica, descubre que quiza pueda convertirse en la heroina involuntaria de su propia historia.Las novelas de Mavis Gallant son tan memorables como sus famosos cuentos. Llena de ingenio y de mordacidad, Una vida aceptable es una obra maestra del siglo XX, satirica y compasiva. Libre y arrolladora.

This generous collection of fifty-two stories, selected from across her prolific career by the author, includes a preface in which she discusses the sources of her art.A widely admired master of the short story, Mavis Gallant was a Canadian-born writer who lived in France and died in 2014 at the age of ninety-one. Her more than one hundred stories, most published in The New Yorker over five decades beginning in 1951, have influenced generations of writers and earned her comparisons to Anton Chekhov, Henry James, and George Eliot. She has been hailed by Michael Ondaatje as one of the great story writers of our time.With irony and an unfailing eye for the telling detail, Gallant weaves stories of spare complexity, often pushing the boundaries of the form in boldly unconventional directions. The settings in TheCollected Stories range from Paris to Berlin to Switzerland, from the Italian Riviera to the Cote dAzur, and her characters are almost all exiles of one sort or another, as she herself was for most of her expatriate life. The wit and precision of her prose, combined with her expansive view of humanity, provide a rare and deep reading pleasure. With breathtaking control and compression, Gallant delivers a whole life, a whole world, in each story.

A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS ORIGINALMavis Gallant is a contemporary legend, a frequent contributor to The New Yorkerfor close to fifty years who has, in the words of The New York Times, "radically reshaped the short story for decade after decade." Michael Ondaatjes new selection of Gallants work gathers some of the most memorable of her stories set in Europe and Paris, where Gallant has long lived. Mysterious, funny, insightful, and heartbreaking, these are tales of expatriates and exiles, wise children and straying saints. Together they compose a secret history, at once intimate and panoramic, of modern times.

A New York Review Books OriginalMavis Gallant is renowned as one of the great short-story writers of our day. This new gathering of long-unavailable or previously uncollected work presents stories from 1951 to 1971 and shows Gallants progression from precocious virtuosity, to accomplished artistry, to the expansive innovatory spirit that marks her finest work. "Madeleines Birthday," the first of Gallants many stories to be published in The New Yorker, pairs off a disaffected teenager, abandoned by her social-climbing mother, with a complacent middle-aged suburban housewife, in a subtly poignant comedy of miscommunication that reveals both characters to be equally adrift. "The Cost of Living," the extraordinary title story, is about a company of strangers, shipwrecked over a chilly winter in a Parisian hotel and bound to one another by animosity as much as by unexpected love. Set in Paris, New York, the Riviera, and Montreal and full of scrupulously observed characters ranging from freebooters and malingerers to runaway children and fashion models, Gallants stories are at once satirical and lyrical, passionate and skeptical, perfectly calibrated and in constant motion, brilliantly capturing the fatal untidiness of life.

AN NYRB CLASSICS ORIGINAL Mavis Gallants novels are as memorable as her renowned short stories. Full of wit and psychological poignancy, A Fairly Good Time, here with Green Water,Green Sky, encapsulates Gallants unparalleled skill as a storyteller. Shirley Perrigny (nee Norrington, then briefly Higgins), the heroine of A Fairly Good Time, is an original. Derided by the Parisians she lives among and chided by her fellow Canadians, this young widowrecently remarried to a French journalist named Philippeis fond of quoting Jane Austen and Kingsley Amis and of using her myopia as a defense against social aggression. As the fixed points in Shirleys life begin to recedePhilippe having apparently though not definitively lefther freewheeling, makeshift, and self-abnegating ways come to seem an aspect of devotion to her fellow man. Could this unreliable protagonist be the unwitting heroine of her own story? Green Water, Green Sky, Gallants first novel, is a darker tale of the fractured family life of Bonnie McCarthy, an American divorcee, and her daughter, Flor. Uprooted and unmoored, mother and daughter live like itinerantsin Venice, Cannes, and Parisglamorous and dependent. With little hope of escape, Flor attempts to flee this untidy life and the false notes of her mother.

Mavis Gallant is the modern master of what Henry James called the international story, the fine-grained evocation of the quandaries of people who must make their way in the world without any place to call their own. The irreducible complexity of the very idea of home is especially at issue in the stories Gallant has written about Montreal, where she was born, although she has lived in Paris for more than half a century.Varieties of Exile, Russell Bankss extensive new selection from Gallants work, demonstrates anew the remarkable reach of this writers singular art. Among its contents are three previously uncollected stories, as well as the celebrated semi-autobiographical sequence about Linnet Muirstories that are wise, funny, and full of insight into the perils and promise of growing up and breaking loose.

Venecia, Cannes y Paris componen el falsamente glamouroso escenario de la vida de Florence McCarthy Harris, una muchacha americana que pasa su juventud viajando por Europa y viviendo de la caridad de los familiares de la mano de su madre, Bonnie, que, a causa de su divorcio, no podia soportar ya seguir viviendo en America. Mientras asistimos al atribulado descenso a la locura de Flor, seran cuatro las voces que, a modo de un cuadro cubista, se superpondran y revelaran la realidad fracturada de una joven que es arrastrada por su madre a una vida de movimiento constante en un continente desconocido. Una novela sobre la naturaleza humana que, enmarcada en una enfermiza relacion maternofilial, trata con gran delicadeza sobre la necesidad de un hogar y la fragilidad que supone el desarraigo.

In stories of astonishing compression and insight, Mavis Gallant wrote of characters severed from their home, exiles disconnected from each other and from themselves. Tracing the fault lines of the post-war world in the intimate lives of her characters, she could conjure an entire worldview in a telling gesture or passing comment.This new volume, selected and introduced by Tessa Hadley, collects the finest work from across Gallants career. Here are stories of young men returning from wartime internment to changed families, snobbish social climbers haunted by the words of their downtrodden colleagues, and children peering through glass at the secrets and infidelities of their parents. Complex, moving and painfully true, they secure her position among the worlds great short story writers.

Los mejores relatos de una de las grandes cuentistas contemporáneas, a la que Alice Munro consideró su maestra.«Los cuentos de Mavis Gallant son los mejores de nuestro tiempo.»Michael OndaatjeUNO DE