A Fairly Good Time: With Green Water, Green Sky, Paperback

AN NYRB CLASSICS ORIGINAL

Mavis Gallant's novels are as memorable as her renowned short stories. Full of wit and psychological poignancy, A Fairly Good Time, here with Green Water, Green Sky, encapsulates Gallant's unparalleled skill as a storyteller.

Shirley Perrigny (n e Norrington, then briefly Higgins), the heroine of A Fairly Good Time, is an original. Derided by the Parisians she lives among and chided by her fellow Canadians, this young widow--recently remarried to a French journalist named Philippe--is fond of quoting Jane Austen and Kingsley Amis and of using her myopia as a defense against social aggression. As the fixed points in Shirley's life begin to recede--Philippe having apparently though not definitively left--her freewheeling, makeshift, and self-abnegating ways come to seem an aspect of devotion to her fellow man. Could this unreliable protagonist be the unwitting heroine of her own story?

Green Water, Green Sky, Gallant's first novel, is a darker tale of the fractured family life of Bonnie McCarthy, an American divorc e, and her daughter, Flor. Uprooted and unmoored, mother and daughter live like itinerants--in Venice, Cannes, and Paris--glamorous and dependent. With little hope of escape, Flor attempts to flee this untidy life and the false notes of her mother.

About the Author:

Mavis Gallant (1922-2014) was born in Montreal and worked as a journalist at the Montreal Standard before moving to Europe to devote herself to writing fiction. In 1950, after traveling extensively she settled in Paris, where she would remain for the rest of her life. Over the course of her career Gallant published more than one hundred stories and dispatches in The New Yorker. In 2002 she received the Rea Award for the Short Story and in 2004, the PEN/Nabokov Award for lifetime achievement. In addition to A Fairly Good Time, New York Review Books Classics publishes three collections of Gallant's short stories: Paris Stories, Varieties of Exile, and The Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories.

Peter Orner is the author of two collections of stories, Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge and Esther Stories, and two novels, Love and Shame and Love and The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo. He is also the editor of two books of oral history, Underground America and Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives. His book of nonfiction Am I Alone Here? will be published in November 2016. Orner has received Guggenheim and Lannan Foundation fellowships, and two Pushcart Prizes. He teaches at San Francisco State University.