Malvern staff member Fernando is a New York Review Books Classics enthusiast, and he has an excellent recommendation for y’all…

Varieties of Exile by Mavis Gallant

Perhaps overshadowed by her contemporary Alice Munro—another female, Canadian writer of short stories—Mavis Gallant’s work deserves a wider readership. To date, NYRB Classics has released four collections of her work, all filled with nuance and comic moments of deep humanity. I’ve never read anything written quite the way her stories unfold, how encounters with peripheral people in our lives also shape us. Varieties of Exile is a good introduction, although I would say Paris Stories (which collects the work she wrote while living in that city) is a good place, too.

Also recommended, the short story collection You’ll Enjoy It When You Get There by Elizabeth Taylor. (Not that Elizabeth Taylor!)