James Gallant

James Gallant has won the sixth annual Nicholas Schaffner Award for Music in Literature with his short story collection, "La Leona and Other Guitar Stories," now available in either Kindle or paperback editions from Amazon.

Foreword Reviews, which gave "La Leona" a five-star rating in its July/August 2020 issue, comments in a review by Karen Rigby, "James Gallant’s intricate stories traverse medieval Spain, Elizabethan Denmark, and revolutionary France. In “Isaac Albéniz Attends His Own Funeral,” a dead pianist surveys the public reaction to his departure, his tactile descriptions building toward awareness that his newfound freedom isn’t all that the afterlife has in store. In “The Spanish Buddha,” a compact, poignant story set during the Spanish Civil War, a mortar shell destroys an instructor’s early work; this disturbs him at first, but proves to be a relief, hinting at the gray trade-offs between rewards and losses.

"In another story, a lovestruck man hears an Arab’s six-string guitar whose “mellifluous sonority” he’s certain would win a woman’s affections. Elsewhere, an English vihuela player travels for a royal performance; Shakespeare, in a twist of truth, stages Hamlet in Elsinore. A guitar instructor finds an unexpected, apt pupil in a much-favored girl who turns to music for respite. A journeying musician helps Marat to fall asleep before the troubled leader is murdered."

Gallant's speculative essays in his "Verisimilitudes: essays and approximations," published in paperback by The Fortnightly Review press (2018), deal with what Jeffrey Kripal, professor of religion at Rice University, has described as "some of the most intellectually challenging and inherently fascinating subjects imaginable: the UFO phenomenon, occult materializations and the like."

Gallant is author, also, of the comic novel "The Big Bust at Tyrone's Rooming House: a Novel of Atlanta," from Glad Day Books. .