- Paperback: 328 pages
- Publisher: Emblem Editions; 1st Emblem printing edition (Nov 13 2001)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0771032935
- ISBN-13: 978-0771032936
- Product Dimensions: 20.8 x 13.7 x 2 cm
- Shipping Weight: 23 g
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
#7,153 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #10 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Canadian > Women Writers
- #54 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Short Stories
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
The title story of Mavis Gallant's From the Fifteenth District is a very strange sort of ghost story. It recounts, in a decidedly clinical manner, a handful of strange European hauntings: Major Travella, killed defusing a bomb in a civilian area, who haunts the congregation at St. Michael's, turning up for communion once a year; a doctor and a social worker who haunt a dead immigrant woman; and the young, deceased wife of a notable philosopher who haunts her with the evidence of her virtuous life. This is the strangest story in Gallant's collection, but it exemplifies the tenor of these stories, in which the living haunt Europe's dead, and expatriates haunt the Riviera, all of them lacking the fulfillment that life could, and should, bring.
From the Fifteenth District is among the most accomplished of Gallant's collections of short fiction, and it contains many of her best-known stories, including "Baum, Gabriel, 1935-( )," one of the most original accounts of postwar European Jewry ever written, and "The Moslem Wife," a powerful tale of an anemic marriage in a community of British expatriates in northern Italy as the Second World War sweeps in. This is a prime introduction to Gallant's techniques and preoccupations: most of her books look at this gloomy, primarily postwar Europe, but From the Fifteenth District has a special power that makes it a particularly fine testament to her talent. --Jack Illingworth
Review
“Mavis Gallant writes some of the most superbly crafted and perceptive stories of our time.”
–Globe and Mail
“Gallant’s fiction is so finely observed and so forbearing in the face of the shortcomings we ascribe to human nature that the reader might easily come away with the impression that these stories are narrated by God.”
–Mirabella
“Superb…From the Fifteenth District brings us Mavis Gallant at the height of her powers.”
–Toronto Star
“I’m certain that there isn’t a finer living writer of fiction in the English language.
There couldn’t be.”
–Books in Canada
“One of Canada’s best short-story writers.”
–New Brunswick Reader
“Gallant achieves the extraordinarily difficult task of capturing a world and a way of thinking in these little masterpieces.…She is something of a magician: one can watch closely, but in the end her stories defy our rational senses, and the result is a type of literary magic.”
–Edmonton Journal
“When so many others are forgotten, Gallant will be there.”
–Globe and Mail
“Reading any one of Mavis Gallant’s stories is like viewing the entire universe through an electron microscope; in her hands fiction seems infinitely flexible and capacious. And all the complexity of insight, the breadth of understanding, the density of thought and intensity of feeling are delivered with thrilling charm, a thrilling lightness of touch.”
–Deborah Eisenberg
“One of the best that ever came out of this country.”
–Morley Callaghan
–Globe and Mail
“Gallant’s fiction is so finely observed and so forbearing in the face of the shortcomings we ascribe to human nature that the reader might easily come away with the impression that these stories are narrated by God.”
–Mirabella
“Superb…From the Fifteenth District brings us Mavis Gallant at the height of her powers.”
–Toronto Star
“I’m certain that there isn’t a finer living writer of fiction in the English language.
There couldn’t be.”
–Books in Canada
“One of Canada’s best short-story writers.”
–New Brunswick Reader
“Gallant achieves the extraordinarily difficult task of capturing a world and a way of thinking in these little masterpieces.…She is something of a magician: one can watch closely, but in the end her stories defy our rational senses, and the result is a type of literary magic.”
–Edmonton Journal
“When so many others are forgotten, Gallant will be there.”
–Globe and Mail
“Reading any one of Mavis Gallant’s stories is like viewing the entire universe through an electron microscope; in her hands fiction seems infinitely flexible and capacious. And all the complexity of insight, the breadth of understanding, the density of thought and intensity of feeling are delivered with thrilling charm, a thrilling lightness of touch.”
–Deborah Eisenberg
“One of the best that ever came out of this country.”
–Morley Callaghan
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