This week, I'm just going to share a few random thoughts about this story. Not Paris. Not Italy. Madrid. (There are so many pretty pictures of Madrid. But this picture makes me think of the women in the story.) Pillar fears she is too old to remarry. She married
Another writer might have titled this story “Summer Games”. But in using a French title, Gallant’s English readers are immediately, if only for a brief moment, inhabiting an unfamiliar place. We have a hint of what’s to come. We are to expect something like the collection’s first story, “By
Along the way, I’ve missed only one of David Bezmozgis’ books. The last novel of his I read was The Free World and, reading through the quotations I saved from that reading, I was struck by how many older passages resonate with this new collection. Here is one which
He’s middle-aged and the father of a grown woman the same age: no wonder Stella thought Henry was a catch, a great romance. Really? A catch? Did Stella really think so? And, even if she did, at one time, once she met his daughter, Peggy, in person, did Stella
“No one is either fully good or fully bad in a Gallant story; her characters are more interesting than that, Gallant is neither a moralist nor a polemicist,” explains Jane Urquhart in the introduction to the Penguin paperback edition of this 1988 collection of stories. In the opening story,
