Montreal Standard Time is drawn from Mavis Gallant’s columns in The Montreal Standard during her six-year tenure at the newspaper, beginning in 1944, when she was 22. Gallant reported on an extraordinary range of subjects: labour issues, mining, existentialism, immigration, comedy, mercy killings, feminism, and suffrage. Her journalism is peopled by a rich cast of characters: writers, painters, politicians, criminals, street kids, war brides, refugees, and unwed mothers. Eighty years after they first saw the light of day, the columns remain as fresh as ever. Written with a precision, flair, and wit that would become her trademark, Montreal Standard Time is journalism of the first order. Taken together, the pieces create a remarkable portrait of Montreal in the eventful years during and after WW2, and of a young woman, fiercely independent and politically active, making her way through it. The book also corrects a long-standing gap in the Gallant oeuvre. Her celebrated reporting on the student riots in Paris in 1968 and on the Gabrielle Russier case are brilliant examples of her in-depth journalism. But that, and her insightful reviews and occasional pieces, have already been collected. Her earliest reporting from The Montreal Standard, however, has never circulated or appeared in book form.
Contributors
Neil Besner
Neil Besner wrote the first PhD on Mavis Gallant’s work in 1983 at UBC and published the first full-length book on Gallant in 1988. He has written or edited books on Alice Munro and Carol Shields and co-edited anthologies of poetry and short fiction for Oxford. His most recent book is Fishing with Tardelli: A Memoir of Family in Time Lost (2022).
Marta Dvořák
Marta Dvorák, University Professor Emeritus (Sorbonne Nouvelle), is the author of Mavis Gallant: The Eye and the Ear (2019).
Bill Richardson
Bill Richardson, a longtime admirer of the writing of Mavis Gallant, began writing about her on Substack in 2022. His books include Bachelor Brothers’ Bed & Breakfast, I Saw Three Ships, and After Hamelin, a novel for children. He lives in Vancouver.
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This project is funded in part by the Government of Canada. Ce projet est financé en partie par le gouvernement du Canada.
