Mavis Gallant

So I was thinking, you know, the more we talk and the more I've been thinking about stories, I always think, oh, I'm not sure I really like stories, but that can't possibly be true.

And then I begin to think, well, what about my favorite short story writer is a Canadian writer called Mavis Gallant who wrote her to Paris and she died in 2014, right? And her short stories are very strange.

And why I love them is that they're narratives that reveal the human sort of vanities, frailties that makes us a type of being that needs story to act morally.

She's into all of those gray areas, but also she captures the mystery of our emotional lives through language all the time.

I mean, novels and letters certainly work that way.

Um, and there's a great Mavis Gallant story, Ma-Mademoiselle Da Co- uh, Da Costa, that's in second person.

But and then, and then first person obviously is the closest you're gonna get.

But, but then a question of like do you call the character Smith, Mr. Smith, Joe, Joe Smith, you know, what I, you, you know, what you call.

Welcome back to another reading at the Barrow.

I'm going to read another Mavis Gallant.

This is going to be the last one we read from her collection, Varieties of Exile, put out by the New York Review of Books.

And today's story is The End of the World.

They taught the canonical modern short story.

Alice Munro, Chekhov, Hemingway, Mavis Gallant, people like that.

New Yorker stories, John Cheever, that kind of thing.

A lot of those early teachers I had sort of acted as if experimental or avant-garde fiction didn't exist.