Writers & Stories | Jianan Qian Reads Mavis Gallant
About "Writers & Stories:"
Every writer has a story that’s close to their heart. In our new CraftClass series, Writers & Stories, we invite a writer each month to share their thoughts and feelings about a story of their choice and lead an intimate, insightful conversation around it. This 90-minute class will cover the writer’s personal experience of the story, why it sticks in their head, and where its power to move, provoke, and change our minds comes from. You’ll walk away with not just one more good story but also a special memory of engaging with it with love, care, and wisdom.
This month, we are delighted to have O.Henry Prize recipient and Granta contributor Jianan Qian to share her favorite story with us.
Ada has picked this story for discussion: The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street by Mavis Gallant, published in The New Yorker in 1963.
About Mavis Gallant & The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street:
Mavis Gallant was born in 1922 in Quebec, Canada, and grew up in both Montreal and New York. At the age of twenty-eight, she left her previous job in journalism and moved to Europe to pursue fiction writing. After a brief stay in Spain, she eventually settled in Paris, France. From the 1950s to the 1990s, she published an impressive 116 short stories in The New Yorker, a figure rivaling that of American writers John Cheever and John Updike. Contemporary authors such as Jhumpa Lahiri and Michael Ondaatje have referred to Gallant as one of their literary heroes.
The protagonists of Gallant’s stories are often expatriates lost in foreign lands, fractured marriages, and lives caught in the tension between self-deception and harsh reality. Literary critic Grazia Merler, in her book Mavis Gallant: Narrative Patterns and Devices, notes: “The development of psychological characters is not at the core of Gallant’s fiction, nor is plot. Rather, it is the unfolding of specific situations and the reconstruction of psychological or emotional states that are her primary aims.” Gallant’s work is like a linguistic labyrinth—the narrator does not reveal the answers but hides clues in carefully chosen words, rich detail, and a tone steeped in subtext. To read Gallant is to miss nothing; readers must piece together these clues to unravel the literary mystery. This is why her stories reward rereading and remain resonant long after.
In Gallant’s short story The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street, the protagonist Peter Frazier resembles a remnant of pre–World War Western aristocracy, living in a dream of self-deception. Yet this faded scion forms a brief, unlikely friendship with a colleague of humble origins and saintly endurance. In this lesson, we will search for traces within the story to understand how this friendship came to be. This is not a simple tale of empathy—in Gallant’s intricately constructed narrative trap, this seemingly improbable understanding takes on profound meaning. We will explore how Gallant, through precision and clarity, leads us into a world of openness and ambiguity.
About Jianan Qian:
Jianan Qian is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California. She writes in both Chinese and English. Her Chinese-language works include The Person Who Doesn’t Eat Eggs and Some Futures I Don’t Want to Go To. Her English fiction has appeared in Granta, The Los Angeles Review, The Millions, and other publications. She has received the Jury Prize of the Taiwan Times Literary Award and the O. Henry Prize in the United States.
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