The immensity of Gallant's achievement still seems insufficiently recognized. Alice Munro's Nobel notwithstanding, Gallant may in fact have been the best pure story writer since the early-1950s prime of Cheever, Welty, and Flannery O'Connor, and even in such august company, Gallant's stories are sui generis. They do something different than perfecting the tradition or stretching the boundaries of what the form can do. For all their expansiveness, Gallant's stories constitute a striking and almost avant-garde reduction: in reading her, one feels like they discover something about what a short story really is and isn't--about what is necessary, and what is sufficient.

The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant includes over thirty stories never before collected in one volume, including "The Accident" and "His Mother" and "An Autobiography" and "Dedé." With the publication of this book, finally all of this modern master's fiction will be in print.