varieties of exile

A Look at the Best Books of 2020

Lee Polevoi

The biggest discovery of my reading year was the work of Canadian author Mavis Gallant, who died in 2014. A hundred or more of her short stories appeared in the New Yorker many years ago, and they feel as fresh and insightful as if they’d been written yesterday. Set in Montreal and later in Paris, where Gallant lived most of her life, the stories glitter with wit, hum with fascinating subtext, and abound in a kind of aristocratic luxury that’s no longer with us.

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