“All raise hands, please, who remember Rosalia. (Camera on studio smiles.)” You remember Rosalia, right? We met her in “A Painful Affair”, this collection’s fourth story: the dedicated servant of Miss Mary Margaret Pugh. Miss Pugh’s artistic patronage is not-yet-transpired in “Larry” (Larry is her half-brother), it’s an already-transpired-fact
Taraghi, Levy, Hébert, Gallant and King Short Stories in April, May and June Whether in a dedicated collection or a magazine, these stories capture a variety of reading moods. This quarter, I returned to three favourite writers and also explored two new-to-me story writers.
As soon as I met Henri Grippes, I felt like I knew him. He reminded me of Charles Filandreux in “Siegfried’s Memoirs” (in Coming Ashore). Filandreux is a writer, all tied up in knots at the idea of writing a review he “would undoubtedly be requested to write”. Except
Imagine a ribbon. Pinch a loop of it between your index finger and thumb. The small piece you grasp is where the story begins and ends, while in between recounting “the year of shocks”. We meet the Clairvoie family when son Luc has failed his course of study. Spectacularly
We have to assume that Speck came first, with “Speck’s Idea” published in 1979. “Overhead in a Balloon” was published five years later (both stories in the pages of “The New Yorker”, where the majority of Mavis Gallant’s stories appeared before they were bound into collections). So we have
