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End of the World and Other Stories
Book by Gallant, Mavis
167 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1974
About the author
Mavis Gallant
88 books258 followersCanadian journalist and fiction writer. In her twenties, Gallant worked as a reporter for the Montreal Standard. She left journalism in 1950 to pursue fiction writing. To that end, always needing autonomy and privacy, she moved to France.
In 1981, Gallant was honoured by her native country and made an Officer of the Order of Canada for her contribution to literature. That same year she also received the Governor General's Award for literature for her collection of stories, Home Truths. In 1983-84, she returned to Canada as the University of Toronto's writer-in-residence. In 1991 Queen’s University awarded her an honorary LL.D. In 1993 she was promoted to Companion of the Order of Canada.
In 1989, Gallant was made a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2000, she won the Matt Cohen Prize, and in 2002 the Rea Award for the Short Story. The O. Henry Prize Stories of 2003 was dedicated to her. In 2004, Gallant was awarded a Lannan Literary Fellowship.
With Alice Munro, Gallant was one of a few Canadian authors whose works regularly appeared in The New Yorker. Many of Gallant’s stories had debuted in the magazine before subsequently being published in a collection.
Although she maintained her Canadian citizenship, Gallant continued to live in Paris, France since the 1950s.
On November 8, 2006, Mavis Gallant received the Prix Athanase-David from the government of her native province of Quebec. She was the first author writing in English to receive this award in its 38 years of existence.
In 1981, Gallant was honoured by her native country and made an Officer of the Order of Canada for her contribution to literature. That same year she also received the Governor General's Award for literature for her collection of stories, Home Truths. In 1983-84, she returned to Canada as the University of Toronto's writer-in-residence. In 1991 Queen’s University awarded her an honorary LL.D. In 1993 she was promoted to Companion of the Order of Canada.
In 1989, Gallant was made a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2000, she won the Matt Cohen Prize, and in 2002 the Rea Award for the Short Story. The O. Henry Prize Stories of 2003 was dedicated to her. In 2004, Gallant was awarded a Lannan Literary Fellowship.
With Alice Munro, Gallant was one of a few Canadian authors whose works regularly appeared in The New Yorker. Many of Gallant’s stories had debuted in the magazine before subsequently being published in a collection.
Although she maintained her Canadian citizenship, Gallant continued to live in Paris, France since the 1950s.
On November 8, 2006, Mavis Gallant received the Prix Athanase-David from the government of her native province of Quebec. She was the first author writing in English to receive this award in its 38 years of existence.
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April 15, 2025Margaret Atwood
Atwood is the author of “The Handmaid’s Tale” (1985) and “Burning Questions” (2022), among many other books.
In 1965, when I was twenty-five and starting out as a writer, I was reading The New Yorker, as all of us young writers did. The magazine published short stories and I wrote them, though, at that time, not very many of them and not very well. In the April 3rd issue, I came across a story called “Orphans’ Progress,” by Mavis Gallant, a writer I hadn’t heard of. Oddly, it was set in Canada; most of the stories in The New Yorker took place in the United States, and why not? It was an American publication.
In the story, two girls living with a dysfunctional mother in Montreal are taken away from her by well-meaning social workers. The mother is a mess—her husband is dead, she’s become an alcoholic, she’s been sleeping with a series of increasingly awful men, her shoddy abode is exceptionally dirty, her daughters are not bathed, they are not fed healthy food—but the girls love her and she loves them, in her own fashion. Filthy though it was, her home was their nest, and now they have been removed from it. They are sent off to a grandmother in Ontario who is the epitome of cold, self-righteous Protestant virtue. “Whether it is the right thing or the wrong thing as far as the children are concerned, it is the end of love,” the narrator says.
Image may contain: Book, Publication, Page, Text, Person, and Art
April 3, 1965
The grandmother’s maid becomes the children’s main informant, filling their ears with stories about how dirty and feckless their mother was, and how “Christian” it was of their straightlaced grandmother to rescue them. After the grandmother dies, the children are shuffled off to a francophone uncle’s home, where their cousins treat them cruelly and make fun of their accents, and then into a convent run by sadistic nuns, where they are not allowed to see their own bodies when taking a bath: the younger girl must wear a rubber apron, the older one a shift. They grow up and are separated. When the younger one passes her mother’s former home—which she has longed for, off and on, throughout her unloved childhood—she no longer recognizes it.
I was deeply impressed by this story: strong, clear-eyed, meticulously detailed, and ambiguous. Were the children better off for having been “rescued”? What would their lives have been like if they’d stayed with their mother? No answers: the reader must decide.
Years later, I came to know Mavis through my partner, Graeme Gibson, who interviewed her for a Canadian Broadcasting Company literary show called “Anthology.” Whenever we were in Paris, where she lived then, we would see her. She preferred Graeme—with his military bearing and background, he must have reminded her of “the boys” she’d known as a wartime newspaper reporter in Montreal—but she came to tolerate me, once she realized I was not just an auxiliary fluff ball. She was a tough little nut, having had to make her own way from an early age: her personal story had parallels with “Orphans’ Progress.” She was packed off to a convent school when she was four—four!—her somewhat batty mother’s excuse being that the nuns had the best French accents. The reality was that Mavis’s mother didn’t have much time for her, being—like the grandmother in the story—not very maternal, though, in her case, this was attributable not to rigidity but to narcissism. Mavis’s father—whom Mavis loved but considered weak—had died early. Like the orphans, Mavis was bilingual, and had a ringside view of the differences and tensions between the anglophones and the francophones in Canada. In her stories, however, she gave no quarter to either: both can be mean, both can be what the Germans call kinderfeindlich—unfriendly to children.
Despite her difficult childhood, Mavis persevered, through grit, bloody-mindedness, an absence of self-pity, and an ironic sense of humor. Lunch with her was always hilarious and often horrifying: the tales she told about her life exceeded in unlikely gruesomeness even her own fiction. She certainly had the “cold eye” that Yeats recommended for writers, and she saw through subterfuge, no matter who was trying it on.
During one of Graeme’s and my visits to Paris, the Canadian Embassy threw a dinner party for us. Mavis was there and took a dim view of the scanty amount of wine that was provided. When dessert arrived, one of the other guests—a Canadian—said, “This has got booze in it.”
“Well,” Mavis said, audibly enough for everyone nearby to hear. “I should certainly hope so.”
Atwood is the author of “The Handmaid’s Tale” (1985) and “Burning Questions” (2022), among many other books.
In 1965, when I was twenty-five and starting out as a writer, I was reading The New Yorker, as all of us young writers did. The magazine published short stories and I wrote them, though, at that time, not very many of them and not very well. In the April 3rd issue, I came across a story called “Orphans’ Progress,” by Mavis Gallant, a writer I hadn’t heard of. Oddly, it was set in Canada; most of the stories in The New Yorker took place in the United States, and why not? It was an American publication.
In the story, two girls living with a dysfunctional mother in Montreal are taken away from her by well-meaning social workers. The mother is a mess—her husband is dead, she’s become an alcoholic, she’s been sleeping with a series of increasingly awful men, her shoddy abode is exceptionally dirty, her daughters are not bathed, they are not fed healthy food—but the girls love her and she loves them, in her own fashion. Filthy though it was, her home was their nest, and now they have been removed from it. They are sent off to a grandmother in Ontario who is the epitome of cold, self-righteous Protestant virtue. “Whether it is the right thing or the wrong thing as far as the children are concerned, it is the end of love,” the narrator says.
Image may contain: Book, Publication, Page, Text, Person, and Art
April 3, 1965
The grandmother’s maid becomes the children’s main informant, filling their ears with stories about how dirty and feckless their mother was, and how “Christian” it was of their straightlaced grandmother to rescue them. After the grandmother dies, the children are shuffled off to a francophone uncle’s home, where their cousins treat them cruelly and make fun of their accents, and then into a convent run by sadistic nuns, where they are not allowed to see their own bodies when taking a bath: the younger girl must wear a rubber apron, the older one a shift. They grow up and are separated. When the younger one passes her mother’s former home—which she has longed for, off and on, throughout her unloved childhood—she no longer recognizes it.
I was deeply impressed by this story: strong, clear-eyed, meticulously detailed, and ambiguous. Were the children better off for having been “rescued”? What would their lives have been like if they’d stayed with their mother? No answers: the reader must decide.
Years later, I came to know Mavis through my partner, Graeme Gibson, who interviewed her for a Canadian Broadcasting Company literary show called “Anthology.” Whenever we were in Paris, where she lived then, we would see her. She preferred Graeme—with his military bearing and background, he must have reminded her of “the boys” she’d known as a wartime newspaper reporter in Montreal—but she came to tolerate me, once she realized I was not just an auxiliary fluff ball. She was a tough little nut, having had to make her own way from an early age: her personal story had parallels with “Orphans’ Progress.” She was packed off to a convent school when she was four—four!—her somewhat batty mother’s excuse being that the nuns had the best French accents. The reality was that Mavis’s mother didn’t have much time for her, being—like the grandmother in the story—not very maternal, though, in her case, this was attributable not to rigidity but to narcissism. Mavis’s father—whom Mavis loved but considered weak—had died early. Like the orphans, Mavis was bilingual, and had a ringside view of the differences and tensions between the anglophones and the francophones in Canada. In her stories, however, she gave no quarter to either: both can be mean, both can be what the Germans call kinderfeindlich—unfriendly to children.
Despite her difficult childhood, Mavis persevered, through grit, bloody-mindedness, an absence of self-pity, and an ironic sense of humor. Lunch with her was always hilarious and often horrifying: the tales she told about her life exceeded in unlikely gruesomeness even her own fiction. She certainly had the “cold eye” that Yeats recommended for writers, and she saw through subterfuge, no matter who was trying it on.
During one of Graeme’s and my visits to Paris, the Canadian Embassy threw a dinner party for us. Mavis was there and took a dim view of the scanty amount of wine that was provided. When dessert arrived, one of the other guests—a Canadian—said, “This has got booze in it.”
“Well,” Mavis said, audibly enough for everyone nearby to hear. “I should certainly hope so.”
September 12, 2017
Gallant is a really insightful observer of human nature but in contrast most of her characters are given no hope of acheiving the kind of insight that will allow them to step out of their situations or habits of mind. The one character who has a momentary insight succumbs almost immediately to her habits of mind. This may have something to do with the short story format as well as her view of the expats she encountered but it got a little depressing. She must have despised a lot of people. Most of the stories are about expats living incompetently or in some form of alienation.
I read this book for the Read Harder 2017 Challenge "Read a collection of stories by a woman."
I read this book for the Read Harder 2017 Challenge "Read a collection of stories by a woman."
December 28, 2007
I'd never heard of Mavis Gallant until the New Yorker reviewed her collected stories, which then turned up on one of the New School's MFA syllabuses. But now I'm eager to buy that volume and read everything else she ever wrote. Fans of John Cheever (I am) will love these stories; the similarities are evident on only a brief reading. People who are not Cheever fans may also love them; Gallant wrote wonderful sentences that were striking no less for their syntax than for their wit, malice, and perspicacity. The stories also are drawn from a wider range of characters than Cheever's and conform less to type. In fact, I may decide not to finish Cheever's collected until I've finished all these; I think that Gallant's been cheated of the wide renown that he won.
January 15, 2026
"حين مات، قالت لي الممرضة: «أعتذر». كانت خالية من المعنى حين نطقتها، لكن قبل عدة أيام فقط، كانت كل ما ظننت أنني أريد سماعه."
أحيانًا تواجه قصة تباغتك بالتعبير بسلاسة عن جزءٍ منك، جزء لطالما اخفيته بعناية، تريك إياه شفافًا واضحًا تمامًا، فتشعر بالأنس، بأنك مفهومٌ، وأنك لست وحدك في ذلك. وذلك وحده سبب كافٍ للإعجاب بها.
جالانت كاتبة عظيمة، أقول ذلك بثقة وأنا لم أقرأ سوى قصة 'نهاية العالم'. حتمًا سأعود للمزيد.
March 19, 2022
What a writer! The stories are perfectly balanced. The characters often make you think they are on the edge of losing control or are trapped in prisons of their own making, and that people in real life mostly aren't like that; but then you think maybe a lot of people really are like that. The words carve through their minds and around their silhouettes with a diamond-hard edge, but there is still a sense of compassion.
October 7, 2025
This was a phenomenal collection full of amazing little snippets from a whole host of lives across the world, but somehow each of them feels bound together, by common subjects, but also by Mavis Gallant's sharp observations of the human race paired with her endless wit and insightful comments. The portrayals of domestic life are particularly interesting and important to me and range from hopeful to downright tragic. Mavis Gallant was something very special who happened to also be an author by coincidence.
April 11, 2015
Maybe three and a half
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews