SOURCE: Baele, Nancy. “A Climate of Mind.” Canadian Forum 75, no. 858 (April 1997): 35-7.

In the following review, Baele offers high praise for The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant, but criticizes the collection's publisher for how they released the work.

“I have lived in writing, like a spoonful of water in a river, for more than forty-five years,” Mavis Gallant writes in the preface to this landmark edition of her work [The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant]. And because this year's winner of the Molson prize lives in writing with such intensity, such subtlety, such wide vision, she offers her readers the chance to experience the world differently, to have their own vision enlarged and clarified.

Reading this heavy book (she jokes in the preface that it finally had to be restricted to its present 887 pages because any larger and it “would have become one of those tomes that can't...