This program celebrates the remarkable writer Mavis Gallant, a long-time contributor to The New Yorker. In the 1950s Canadian-born Gallant quit a steady journalism job to move to Paris and take a risk on fiction writing, with great success. The tale featured on this program, "Grippes and Poche," chronicles an epic relationship between a wily French novelist and a tax collector. It was published in Gallant's collection Overhead in a Balloon: Twelve Stories of Paris. Gallant reads her own story from the stage at Symphony Space, and the novelist Jhumpa LaHiri pays tribute to Gallant as an inspiration to the current generation of writers.
