AN NYRB CLASSICS ORIGINAL 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 (née 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 family life of Bonnie McCarthy, an American divorcée, 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.

"An NYRB Classics Original Mavis Gallant's two novels are as memorable as her many short stories. Full of wit, whim, and psychological poignancy, A Fairly Good Time, here accompanied by Green Water, Green Sky, encapsulates Gallant's unparalleled skill as a storyteller. Shirley Perrigny (nee Norrington, then briefly Higgins), the heroin of A Fairly Good Time, is an original. Derided by the Parisians she lives among and chided by her fellow Canadians, this young, widowed girl recently remarried to a French journalist named Philippe is fond of quoting from Jane Austen and Kingsley Amis to describe her life 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 the 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 family life 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. From this untidy life and the false notes of her mother, Flor attempts to flee, with little hope of escape"--

The Found Voice: Writers' Beginnings uses the means of literary biography and criticism to do something rarely attempted—to understand how a key creative period establishes the authoritative voice of a unique artist. The essays which explore this hidden process of the writer writing focus on some of the major writers of recent times, V.S. Naipaul, J.M. Coetzee, Alice Munro, William Trevor, and Mavis Gallant. The focus of investigation is a single work by each author, and many of them identify the book in which this turning point was reached. The writers have a somewhat different sense of what the voice is, 'a true voice', 'the voice in the mind', 'the writing voice', etc., yet all of them accept the phrase 'finding a voice' as a decisive and necessary process towards a unique style and vision, their raison d'être as artists. These essays allow each one to define his or her sense of the process of writing, and their style is exploratory. Nevertheless, certain patterns emerge, of migration and cultural displacement, of linguistic self-consciousness, of memory and a reimagining of the first home, of absorbing and rejecting mentors and models. Crucially, the essays rely not just on what led up to the moment of creation but on a sense of the career that emerged from it. Most of the writers have written retrospectively in memoirs, interviews or essays about the pivotal work and its foundational significance. They are the best witnesses to the process, although their silence or their commentary is understood in terms of the many strands of the narrative that each essay presents.

With a confidante’s insights, Marta Dvořák sets up an innovative connection between Mavis Gallant’s dazzling writing and the whole spectrum of the arts. She simultaneously engages with the feats of art making and the adventures of reading, looking, and listening. Drawing on private correspondence and conversations with the Gallant she repositions as a late modernist, Dvořák investigates the relationships between the Paris-based master of the short story and visual and sound culture. Through the filter of philosophical aesthetics, she identifies the painterly, cinematic, and musical dynamics which light up Gallant’s craft. At the same time, she opens a dialogue between Gallant and other international modernists and with those they were reading, watching, and listening to, from the moving pictures which shaped Gallant’s generation to the rhythm and dissonance of, say, Stravinsky and jazz, which − like the Cubist rupture with spatial perspective − spearheaded modernity’s aesthetics of breakage. How does Gallant’s work work? Dvořák’s hands-on rhetorical analyses of Gallant’s stories and lesser-known, recently reissued novels illuminate the superb stylist’s language and vision via an emphasis on both image and rhythm. Providing keys to Gallant’s famous sleights-of-hand and tonal shifts, the discussions reveal a fictional world as multidimensional as a Cubist picture or a symphony − depending on whether we lean towards the eye or the ear.

In the “Newbery Honor–winning author’s compelling fantasy” for young adults, a boy is chosen to rule his idyllic land—only to discover its dark secrets (Publishers Weekly). Green-sky is an ideal place. Violence doesn’t exist. Its citizens, the Kindar, glide from tree to tree and exchange happy thoughts. This is all thanks to their rulers, the Ol-zhaan. And on his thirteenth birthday, Raamo D’ok is chosen to become one of the Ol-zhaan. Raamo is surprised to be named a Chosen. He isn’t a very good student—but the Ol-zhaan believe he has strong Spirit-force. But during his training, Raamo discovers that these good rulers aren’t as benevolent as they appear. They harbor secrets about his people, his family, and what lies below the forest floor. Now Raamo must decide: Should he keep the peace, or reveal the secrets that the Ol-zhaan have protected for so long? This ebook features an extended biography of Zilpha Keatley Snyder.

Karen Smythe's theoretical study is concerned largely with the works of two of the best short story writers in the English language Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro. Although Gallant and Munro have received increasing attention in recent years, most critics have taken a general approach to their works, usually discussing the themes of memory and loss. In contrast, Smythe focuses specifically on the importance of elegy in these fictions and on the role the reader plays in reading them.