["From the Fifteenth District"] is billed as "a novella and eight short stories," but it's not clear which is the novella…. Each is densely woven, wide-ranging, rich in people and plots—a miniature world, more satisfying than many full-scale novels….

Nearly everyone in these stories is expatriated—figuratively if not literally….

Foreigners either in geographical terms, or in terms of time or slant of view, these people provide the sense of distance that makes Mavis Gallant's writing so coolly, dead-center accurate. They seem surprised to find themselves in their particular lives. They describe their surroundings with a clarity that appears to have been startled out of them….

They are afflicted with bizarre handicaps that they treat as normal—a tendency to suspend one's breathing, for instance, or the audible, inner commands of a younger self requesting "a child's version of justice … an impossible world." In the title story...