Paris Stories

Mavis Gallant was born in Montreal, Canada on August 11, 1922. Her parents sent her to live at a French convent when she was 4. When she was 10, her father died from kidney disease. Her mother quickly remarried and moved to New York - leaving her daughter behind. During World War II, Gallant worked in the cutting room at the National Film Board of Canada and as a reporter for the Montreal Standard. She eventually became a columnist and feature writer. Two of her short stories appeared in the December, 1944, issue of Preview. She published more than 100 stories in The New Yorker beginning in 1951. During her lifetime, she wrote two novels and several short story collections. Her works include Green Water, Green Sky; A Fairly Good Time; Overhead in a Balloon; Across the Bridge; The Pegnitz Junction; Paris Stories; and The Cost of Living. She received several awards including the Governor-General's Award for Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories, the Pen Nabokov Award for career achievement, the Matt Cohen Prize in 2000, and the Rea Award for the Short Story in 2002. In 1981, she was made Officer of the Order of Canada for her contribution to literature that year. She died on February 18, 2014 at the age 91. Michael Ondaatje has published several volumes of poetry, including There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do, which consists of selections from earlier books, The Dainty Monsters (1967) and Rat Jelly (1973). Much of his poetry addresses the crossing of cultural boundaries. Ondaatje was born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and moved to Canada in 1962. He earned a B.A. from the University of Toronto and a M.A. from Queen's University, Kingston, and teaches English at York University. Ondaatje's fiction and other works that defy classification by genre have also gained widespread attention. A writer quite unconcerned with typical Canadian themes, he focuses on the bizarre, which he renders through surreal, innovative techniques. For example, in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), Ondaatje toys with various literary genres - drama, interviews, lyrics - to relate the life of that legendary figure. In Coming through Slaughter (1982), supposedly the biography of jazz musician Charles "Buddy" Bolden, Ondaatje uses Bolden's life to illustrate the artistic dichotomy of creativity and destruction. Running in the Family (1982) is a fictionalized account of Ondaatje's Ceylonese ancestors. In the Skin of a Lion (1987) dramatizes the heroic efforts of workers who construct skyscrapers.