This generous collection of fifty-two stories, selected from across her prolific career by the author, includes a preface in which she discusses the sources of her art.
A widely admired master of the short story, Mavis Gallant was a Canadian-born writer who lived in France and died in 2014 at the age of ninety-one. Her more than one hundred stories, most published in The New Yorker over five decades beginning in 1951, have influenced generations of writers and earned her comparisons to Anton Chekhov, Henry James, and George Eliot. She has been hailed by Michael Ondaatje as "one of the great story writers of our time."
With irony and an unfailing eye for the telling detail, Gallant weaves stories of spare complexity, often pushing the boundaries of the form in boldly unconventional directions. The settings in The Collected Stories range from Paris to Berlin to Switzerland, from the Italian Riviera to the Côte d'Azur, and her characters are almost all exiles of one sort or another, as she herself was for most of her expatriate life. The wit and precision of her prose, combined with her expansive view of humanity, provide a rare and deep reading pleasure. With breathtaking control and compression, Gallant delivers a whole life, a whole world, in each story.

Introduction by Francine Prose
Select Bibliography
Chronology
Preface by Mavis Gallant
 
THE THIRTIES AND FORTIES
The Moslem Wife (1976
The Four Seasons (1975)
The Fenton Child (1993)
 
THE FIFTIES
The Other Paris (1953)
Across The Bridge (1993)
The Latehomecomer (1974)
Senor Pined (1954)
By the Sea (1954)
When We Were Nearly Young (1960)
The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street (1963)
The Remission (1979)
 
THE SIXTIES
The Captive Niece (1969)
Questions and Answers (1966)
Ernst in Civilian Clothes (1963)
An Unmarried Man’s Summer (1963)
April Fish (1968)  
In Transit (1965)
O Lasting Peace (1972)
An Alien Flower (1972)
The End of the World (1967)
New Year’s Eve (1970)
 
THE SEVENTIES
In the Tunnel (1971)
Irina (1974)
Potter (1977)
Baum, Gabriel, 1935–( )(1979)
Speck’s Idea (1979)
From the Fifteenth District (1978)
The Pegnitz Junction (1973)
 
THE EIGHTIES AND NINETIES
Luc and His Father (1982)
Overhead in a Balloon (1984)
Kingdom Come (1986)
Forain (1991)
A State of Affairs (1991)
Mlle. Dias de Corta (1992)
Scarves, Beads, Sandals (1995)
 
LINNET MUIR
The Doctor (1977)
Voices Lost in Snow (1976)
In Youth Is Pleasure (1975)
Between Zero and One (1975)
Varieties of Exile (1976)
 
THE CARETTE SISTERS
1933 (1985/8)
The Chosen Husband (1985)
From Cloud to Cloud (1985)
Florida (1985)
 
EDOUARD, JULIETTE, LENA
A Recollection (1983)
The Colonel’s Child (1983)
Rue de Lille(1983)
Lena (1983)
 
HENRI GRIPPES
A Painful Affair (1981)
A Flying Start (1982)
Grippes and Poche (1982)
In Plain Sight (1993) 

Mavis Gallant; Introduction by Francine Prose