"My name is Renée. I am fifty-four years old. For twenty-seven years I have been the concierge at number 7, rue de Grenelle, a fine hôtel particulier with a courtyard and private gardens, divided into eight luxury apartments …" In Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog, readers cosy up
The first story in this Mavis Gallant reading project was "The Other Paris", the title story in her first collection. Therein, a young woman's dreams of Paris fell through (with her dreams of the romance she had imagined). Even after she became engaged to be married, Carol was weary of
This story falls between some longer ones in Going Ashore, with Mavis Gallant's early and uncollected stories, "One Morning in May" and "A Day Like Any Other". Both stories in which young people's innocence moves into the shadows of experience. In the shorter stories I've been reading lately, "From Gamut to Yalta",
Continuing in the vein of "From Gamut to Yalta" and "Dido Flute, Spouse to Europe", in only four pages, Mavis Gallant presents a cursory view of a life. Background music for Siegfried and Charles Although ostensibly an exercise in objectivity, a writer's imagined review of a man's memoirs,
Presented as the "Addenda to a Major Biography", noted to be nearly 1000 pages long, these three pages are not a typical short story. Readers are left to assemble their impressions of Dido based on fragments of a relationship which occupied only a fragment of her life from a relational
