Hailed by critics as a “first-rate short story writer” (Michel Lord, Lettres québécoises), Lise Gauvin explores ever-changing feelings in a world where the ease of travel contains its share of unpredictability and surprises. This clear-headed observer of the social scene combines intricate detail with a larger picture conveyed in forms that are new each time in a style pared down to the essentials, free of artifice and pathos. Each short story is a sequence snatched from passing life, a parenthesis excerpted from day-to-day existence examined with clinical precision.

“Lise Gauvin’s style is very simple, unpretentious, at times, almost harsh [. . .] one senses that Lise Gauvin intended to reduce her texts to the essential, without sentiment or pathos. This is work done under the microscope, with a scalpel.”
~ Jean Basile, Le Devoir

“The best qualities of Lise Gauvin’s art are apparent: formal ingenuity, subtlety of expression, a distillation of emotion that goes far beyond mere surface meanings.”
~ Gilles Marcotte, L’Actualité

“The adroitness of Gauvin’s prose and her vivid inventiveness make for pleasurable reading far away from scholarly lectures.” ~ Ann Bois, The Gazette

Lise Gauvin has published approximately twenty works (non-fiction, fictional essays, interviews, poetry, narratives, and short stories) and contributes to the newspaper Le Devoir as a literary critic. Parentheses is her third short story collection, following Fugitives (translated by Jonathan Kaplansky) and Arrêts sur image (translated as Freeze-frame).