Mavis Gallant is the modern master of what Henry James called the international story, the fine-grained evocation of the quandaries of people who must make their way in the world without any place to call their own. The irreducible complexity of the very idea of home is especially at issue in the stories Gallant has written about Montreal, where she was born, although she has lived in Paris for more than half a century. Varieties of Exile, Russell Banks's extensive new selection from Gallant's work, demonstrates anew the remarkable reach of this writer's singular art. Among its contents are three previously uncollected stories, as well as the celebrated semi-autobiographical sequence about Linnet Muir—stories that are wise, funny, and full of insight into the perils and promise of growing up and breaking loose.

In 1863, the Dine (Navajo) faced transformations to their way of life with the Americans' determination to first subjugate and then remove them to a reservation in order to begin their assimilation to American culture. This book exposes the series of events that facilitated the Navajo's removal from their homeland, their experiences during the Long Walk, their time at the Bosque Redondo reservation, their return home, and the ways in which they remember the Long Walk and the Bosque Redondo.

"Longer--but lesser--Simenon: a gloomy, picaresque tale of doomed love (originally published in France in 1936), featuring yet another Simenon quasi-hero who is led astray by an unworthy woman. Joseph ("Jef") Mittel, young second-generation anarchist (he has reluctantly followed in his legendary father's footsteps), finds himself on the run with lover/comrade Charlotte. . .who has murdered her former employer/lover for supposedly "political" reasons. At Dieppe they sneak aboard a freighter operated by Capt. Mopps, an amoral Dutch gun-runner headed for Panama: Joseph numbly stands by--working as a stoker--while Charlotte promptly becomes Mopps' bedmate. But, after a miserable South American cruise (Mopps' gun-deal falls through), the lovers are back together again: Mopps, disturbed by his obsession with Charlotte, dumps her--and Joseph--in Colombia; they find wretched work in a jungle mining-camp; Charlotte is pregnant (but is the baby Joseph's or Mopps'?); they become fearfully involved in the case of a mad Belgian miner who has been murdered (a suicide verdict is sought by the powers-that-be); Charlotte barely survives an attack of typhoid; they dream of somehow getting back to relative civilization in the town of Buenaventura. And finally that dream comes true (along with the birth of Charlotte's baby). . . just when a letter arrives from Capt. Mopps: he's now in Tahiti, running a pleasure boat, and he invites the couple to join him. Will Joseph remember what happened before and decline this offer? Not at all. Ever rootless, he now yearns for Tahiti, managing to get his fam-of-three aboard a yacht headed there, And, inevitably, more misery awaits: Charlotte's infidelities, questions of the baby's paternity, and (despite a native girl's love) Joseph's descent into madness and illness. Despite the Conrad landscape and the Manon Lescaut outline: familiar Simenon themes--in a sturdy, atmospheric melodrama that lacks the lean, ironic shapeliness of Simenon at his best."--Kirkus

Sophie befriends the mythical AlicornNand puts her mysterious powers to the testNin this sequel to "Keeper of the Lost Cities."