Collected here for the first time, these nineteen stories originally appeared in The New Yorker during the 1950s and 60s. With scrupulous precision, a host of remarkably drawn characters are surveyed with a cool wit and sophisticated intelligence as they struggle to transcend the imprisonment of their provisional lives. Sometimes direct, sometimes tantalizingly oblique, Mavis Gallant's finely textured writing demonstrates once again that she is a master of contemporary prose.