Varieties of Exile

Praise

“Often, her fiction drew its energy from contradictory qualities: her stories were minutely observed but also suspenseful, matter-of-fact but also fanciful, reportorial but also imaginative. They were broad-minded, and so felt real…it feels as concrete as anything you might read in the newspaper or see with your own eyes. Gallant had a rare gift: a solid imagination.” —The New Yorker

“Gallant’s subject is the comic opera of character….Before we know it she will have circled a person, captured a voice, revealed a whole manner of a life in the way a character avoids an issue or discusses a dress.” —Michael Ondaatje

“Line by line, word by word, no one writes with more compression than Gallant. Great short stories are sometimes said to be as rich and as full as novels, but hers are as rich and full as encyclopedias.” —Francine Prose, Harper’s

“One of the most brilliant story writers in the language, who deserves to be read as widely as her fellow Canadian Alice Munro. No one writes about brutish people like Gallant; she transforms the meanest human specimens into subjects of high fascination and sympathy, which makes her excellent reading for overheated festival subway commutes.” –Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker