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,
This is one of those strange Paris-soaked stories that I imagine Mavis Gallant writing on an afternoon in a café when she has had too many cups of espresso. When she is in that creative mode where every gesture seen, every syllable overheard, every small intimacy observed between strangers
The novelist who barely disguises the characters he has pulled from reality: here, again, it seems as though we catch a glimpse of another Poche. Now I wonder if Grippes wasn’t forced to camouflage him, after the moment in which Poche queried Grippes about when “What’s-His-Name struggles to prepare
