A New York Review Books Original
Mavis Gallant is admired and beloved as one of the masters of the modern short story. She is a prolific writer, and her 1996 Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant was more than eight
hundred pages long. Even so, this weighty volume left out many wonderful stories that appeared in now out-of-print volumes or in The New Yorker, where Gallant has been a regular
contributor for the last half century. Now The Cost of Living, with an introduction by Jhumpa Lahiri, provides an extensive new sampling of this great writer’s work.
Gallant’s has always been a cosmopolitan sensibility, and these stories take us from Quebec to postwar Europe, with side trips to Germany and the south of France, before landing in Paris, where
Gallant has long lived. A further group of stories are set in New York and New England during the Mad Men era. Everywhere the book reveals Gallant’s subtly penetrating psychological
insight and unsentimental sympathy for the excluded and exiled, not to mention her wicked sense of humor.
