Gambler's Fallacy

The conundrum at the core of "Gambler's Fallacy," author and translator Judith Cowan's seven-story follow-up to her distinguished 1997 debut, "More Than Life Itself", involves an impressively erratic cast of fearful and fragile Quebecois characters, capriciously transformed into victims of the strange vagaries of chance and serendipitous circumstance. Not unlike Raymond Carver or Alice Munro, Cowan creates heartbreakingly felicitous portraits of Chekhovian elegance, featuring the ordinarily forgotten little folks who, for no apparent reason or logical explanation, have fallen through the cracks...Suffused with a largeness of spirit everywhere animated by moments of aching clarity and lyrical grace, Cowan's gritty minimalist vignettes will, if truth be told, simply break the most hardened of readers' hearts. You can bet the farm on it.