This generous collection of 52 stories, selected from across her prolific career by the author, includes a preface in which she discusses the sources of her art.

A widely admired master of the short story, Mavis Gallant was a Canadian-born writer who lived in France and died in 2014 at the age of 91. Her more than 100 stories, most published in The New Yorker over five decades beginning in 1951, have influenced generations of writers and earned her comparisons to Anton Chekhov, Henry James and George Eliot. She has been hailed by Michael Ondaatje as "one of the great short story writers of our time."

With irony and an unfailing eye for the telling detail, Gallant weaves stories of spare complexity, often pushing the boundaries of the form in boldly unconventional directions. The settings in The Collected Stories range from Paris to Switzerland, from the Italian Riviera to the Côte d'Azur, and her characters are almost all exiles of one sort or another, as she herself was for most of her expatriate life. The wit and precision of her prose, combined with her expansive view of humanity, provide a rare and deep reading pleasure. With breathtaking control and compression, Gallant delivers a whole life, a whole world, in each story. (From Penguin Random House)