Amazon.com description: Product Description: The publication of a new collection of short stories by Mavis Gallant is always an event to be celebrated by admirers of fine fiction. These twelve recent stories are set in Paris, the author's adopted home, a city whose nuances she brings to life through a wide range of characters: squabbling writers, bewildered parents, scheming art dealers, beleaguered tenants, and feckless drifters. In "Speck's Idea," an artist's widow proves more than a match for Sandor Speck who hopes to make a name for himself with the aid of her husband's paintings; in the Magdalena stories, an aging woman plays off her husband against his mistress; in "Luc and his Father," a son betrays his father's dreams; rivals in letters, literary poseurs, Prism and Grippes, distort the past. A master of contemporary prose-elegant, concise, finely textured-Gallant never relaxes the tension between detachment and compassion, understanding and mystery, memory and truth. She constantly surprises the reader with her quicksilver perceptions of the moments when the people's illusions are revealed and their lives change irrevocably as they form new, necessary illusions. Blending irony and an unfailing eye for the telling detail, Gallant weaves stories of such intricate simplicity and spare complexity that critics have rightly compared her to Henry James and Anton Chekhov.