Book description
Mavis Gallant is admired and beloved as one of the masters of the
modern short story. Selected from early collections and the New
Yorker, where many of the author's stories have appeared over the
last fifty years, and with an introduction by Jhumpa Lahiri, The
Cost of Living
reveals a writer coming into her own. The stories span the first twenty
years of a long career, from the poise and poignancy of her very first
published story, 'Madeleine's Birthday' (1951), to the masterly
exploration of the passage of time in the long story 'The Burgundy
Weekend' (1971) that appears here in book form for the first time.
Gallant's sensibility has always been cosmopolitan and these
stories take us from Quebec to postwar Europe, via New York and New
England, before settling, like their author, in Paris.
Everywhere the
book reveals Gallant's subtly penetrating psychological insight, wit
and unsentimental sympathy for the excluded and the exiled, not to
mention her wonderfully wicked sense of humour.
Mavis Gallant was born in Montreal in 1922 and worked as a
journalist at The Standard
before moving to Europe in 1950 to devote herself to writing fiction.
After travelling extensively she settled in Paris, where she still
lives. Her many short story collections include The Other
Paris, The End of the World, Home Truths, In
Transit and The Moslem Wife. She is also the author of the
novels Green Water, Green Sky and A Fairly Good Time.
She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in London and a
Companion of the Order of Canada. The Selected Stories of Mavis
Gallant are published by Bloomsbury.
