"The Fifteenth District" - A Short Story by Mavis Gallant - first published October 30, 1978 in The New Yorker

Buried in Print’s Mavis Gallant Project



Buried in Print's Mavis Gallant Project

Mavis Gallant on The Reading Life

August 11, 1922 born in Montréal, in 1950 she moves to France to pursue her dream of being a writer

February 18, 2014, dies in Paris, a place she dearly loved

Buried in Print, a Blog I have happily followed for years, is embarked on a grand project, a read through of all of the 
nearly two hundred Short Stories of Mavis Gallant.  I have access to about half of the stories and am Reading along as I can.  

"The Fifteenth District", first published in The New Yorker October 30, 1978 (reprinted as the title story in a collection of Paris based stories) is one of the weirdest or her stories, showing a dark sense of humor one has to look for in her work to find.  Featuring three ghosts, presented as if their reality is taken for granted, I think Gallant is showing us how post World War Two Paris was full of ghosts, of haunted memories of those with still strong ties to the living.  I learned from the post of Buried in Print that there is no Fifteenth District in Paris.  The fictional one seems to have a lot of the displaced poor, foreigners with no strong claim to be in Paris.  I wondered why she made up a district?

What made this work so much fun for me was the details  about the ghosts and their interaction with the living. 

This is really a delightful story, among her briefer works.

Mel u