We mean it kindly, when we say that a short story contains a novel. For many of us are novel-lovers, first or only, and, so, this seems a high compliment. What we are observing is how quickly an author can beckon us into the heart of a character, how
There have been many Christmases in Mazo de la Roche’s novels, too: not quite a hundred, but several. “Ninety-nine Christmases had been celebrated at Jalna. In its first Christmas Philip and Adeline Whiteoak had been young people and their three children infants. Now all those five were in their
Faust, Gallant, Hawley, Madsen and Ross Short Stories in October, November and December "It was a long time - a long time watching him the way you watch a finger tightening slowly in the trigger of a gun – and then suddenly wrenching himself to action
There are a lot of lonely characters in CanLit: just think about all that snow, how starkly a single shape stands out in relief against the “great northern woods and in the empty places of the earth”. (I’ve recently read Louis Hémon’s snow-soaked 1921 classic, Maria Chapdelaine, translated by
Mavis Gallant’s first sentences are clear and purposeful: they orient readers and offer a glimpse of the story’s tone. “His mother had come of age in the war and then seemed to live a long greyness like a spun-out November.” Another remarkable aspect of her craft is the way
