Overhead in a Balloon Paperback by Mavis Gallant

Product Details

• Publisher: Emblem Editions (2002-09-17)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 240 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780771032943
• Item Weight: 226.8 grams
• Dimensions: 8.39 x 5.41 x 0.58 cm

These twelve stories are set in Paris, Mavis Gallant’s adopted home, a city whose nuances she brings to life through a wide range of characters: squabbling writers, bewildered parents, scheming art dealers, beleaguered tenants, and feckless drifters. An artist’s widow proves more than a match for Sandor Speck, who hopes to make a name for himself with her late husband’s paintings. Literary rivals Prism and Grippes, the protégés of a rich, misguided American patron, battle across the years. And in the Magdalena stories, a man is caught in the pull of loyalties between his beautiful first wife from a marriage of political conscience, and the woman he truly loves.

Elegant, concise, and finely textured, these stories never relax the tension between detachment and compassion, understanding and mystery, memory and truth. With remarkable intelligence and an unfailing eye for the telling detail, Gallant weaves stories of intricate simplicity and spare complexity.

About the Author

MAVIS GALLANT was born in Quebec, Canada, in 1922. She began her career as a journalist, before switching to fiction in 1950. She moved to Paris a decade later, and spent the rest of her life there. She published 116 stories in The New Yorker over the course of her career; additionally, she wrote two novels, a play, and a collection of essays. A recipient of the 2002 Rea Award for the Short Story, Gallant was also awarded the 2004 PEN/Nabokov Award for lifetime achievement and the Governor General's Literary Award for English-language fiction. She was named Officer of the Order of Canada in 1981, and in 1993 she was promoted to Companion of the Order. She died in 2014.