Across the Bridge
In Across the Bridge, four of the eleven stories are connected, following the fortunes of the Carette family in Montreal. In “1933,” their widowed mother teaches Berthe and Marie to deny that she was a seamstress and to say instead that she was “clever with her hands.” In “The Chosen Husband,” the luckless suitor Louis has to undergo the front-parlour scrutiny of Marie’s mother and sister: “But then Louis began to cough and had to cover his mouth. He was in trouble with a caramel. The Carettes looked away, so that he could strangle unobserved.” We then follow their marriage, the birth of Raymond, and Raymond’s flight from his mother and aunt to his…
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August 27, 1994MAVIS GALLANT was born in Quebec, Canada, in 1922. She began her career as a journalist, before switching to fiction in 1950. She moved to Paris a decade later, and spent the rest of her life there. She published 116 stories in The New Yorker over the course of her career; in addition, she wrote two novels, a play, and a collection of essays. A recipient of the 2002 Rea Award for the Short Story and the 2004 PEN/Nabokov Award for lifetime achievement, she died in 2014 at the age of ninety-one.