SOURCE: Gallant, Mavis, and Leslie Schenk. “Celebrating Mavis Gallant.” World Literature Today 72, no. 1 (winter 1998): 19-26.

In the following interview, originally conducted on May 6, 1997, Gallant discusses her literary milieu, its autobiographical dimension, and the French response to her body of work.

Prior to requesting an interview with Mavis Gallant, deservedly and universally recognized as a master of the short story today (which means of all time), I undertook to read her new Collected Stories.¹ Easier said than done. I can take on an 887—page novel with the greatest of ease, but taking on fifty-two short stories amounting to the same number of pages turned out, in this case, to be the equivalent of taking on fifty-two entire novels written by anyone else. For Gallant's stories burst through the limits of what many critics dismiss as the minor art of short-story writing and become indisputably major works of art, thereby...