In 1950, The New Yorker accepted one of Mavis Gallant's short stories for publication and she has since become one of the most accomplished and respected short-story writers of her time. Gallant is an undisputed master whose peerless prose captures the range of human experience in her sweeping portraits set in Europe in the second half of the last century. An expatriate herself, her stories deal with exile, displacement, of love and estranged emotions, but they are never conventional.