This story falls between some longer ones in Going Ashore, with Mavis Gallant's early and uncollected stories, "One Morning in May" and "A Day Like Any Other". Both stories in which young people's innocence moves into the shadows of experience. In the shorter stories I've been reading lately, "From Gamut to Yalta",
Continuing in the vein of "From Gamut to Yalta" and "Dido Flute, Spouse to Europe", in only four pages, Mavis Gallant presents a cursory view of a life. Background music for Siegfried and Charles Although ostensibly an exercise in objectivity, a writer's imagined review of a man's memoirs,
Presented as the "Addenda to a Major Biography", noted to be nearly 1000 pages long, these three pages are not a typical short story. Readers are left to assemble their impressions of Dido based on fragments of a relationship which occupied only a fragment of her life from a relational
So short. Four pages. And, yet, a man considering his entire life and the geo-political map of his day. Its shifting (and not-so shifting) borders are intertwined with his ideas about his marriage. This seems to draw the noose of relationship between the personal and the political uncomfortably - even
As you might have guessed, the characters in Tumbleweed are always in motion. Sometimes literally, as with a hitchhiker in the title story, who has come to an abrupt stop and views the world differently from his sudden stillness. "Through the tinted glass, I beheld quite a sight before
