A New York Review Books Original
Mavis Gallant is renowned as one of the great short-story writers of our
day. This new gathering of long-unavailable or previously uncollected
work presents stories from 1951 to 1971 and shows Gallant's progression
from precocious virtuosity, to accomplished artistry, to the expansive
innovatory spirit that marks her finest work.
Madeleine's Birthday, the first of Gallant's many stories to be
published in The New Yorker, pairs off a disaffected teenager, abandoned
by her social-climbing mother, with a complacent middle-aged suburban
housewife, in a subtly poignant comedy of miscommunication that reveals
both characters to be equally adrift. The Cost of Living, the
extraordinary title story, is about a company of strangers, shipwrecked
over a chilly winter in a Parisian hotel and bound to one another by
animosity as much as by unexpected love.
Set in Paris, New York, the Riviera, and Montreal and full of
scrupulously observed characters ranging from freebooters and
malingerers to runaway children and fashion models, Gallant's stories
are at once satirical and lyrical, passionate and skeptical, perfectly
calibrated and in constant motion, brilliantly capturing the fatal
untidiness of life.