Goodbye to Mavis Gallant

I don’t think I knew anything about Mavis Gallant until I heard Margaret Atwood read one of her stories on the New Yorker short story podcast. Gallant was a Canadian who lived most of her life in Paris, and is considered by many to be one of the best short story writers. She died today and if you are like me and have a long twitter feed of book lovers, you can find many links to roundups and tributes. I’m still getting to know Gallant’s work through the stories themselves, but what I know so far is that her tone and characterizations are unembellished slices of life in a very particular time and place. They might make you feel a bit homesick for something you can’t quite grasp.

In other literary worlds

We editors don’t really hate adverbs, but here’s a tongue-in-cheek demand that adverbs be declared war upon.

Did you know that the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami has a very strict writing regimen, rising early, writing for hours, exercising vigorously, then hitting the pillow at nine p.m.? And there’s more…

And finally, the New Yorker blog has a post about novels that culminate into a single, jaw dropping sentence.

-Sonya Unrein