SOURCE: Dorris, Michael. “A Gallant Storyteller.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (6 October 1996): 1, 12.

In the following review, Dorris surveys the contents and arrangement of stories in The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant, noting that the collection is “far too short.”

Some writers have all the luck: They possess a name so intrinsically right, so appropriate to the quality of fiction they create, that their signature alone demands serious literary attention.

Mavis Gallant's name is intimately connected with the august imprimatur of the New Yorker—as well it should be, since she has been published consistently in that magazine's pages for more than 40 years. Her stories occupy a particular niche: Finely honed, deeply psychological, precise and compact in their language, they examine with an astute, objective eye the peculiar situations of characters who exist outside the expectations of their contexts: English-speaking Quebecois, foreigners in France, Canadians in Florida, artists who...