The Cost of Living

Early and Uncollected Stories

By Mavis Gallant
Introduction by Jhumpa Lahiri

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.

Reviews

Gallant's stories relentlessly ask a few unanswerable and essential questions about our bewildering human condition. We come away from her stories with a keener knowledge of ourselves.
— Alberto Manguel

[Mavis Gallant's] talent, exercised for many years in Parisian exile, is as versatile and witty as it is somber and empathetic.
— John Updike

Mavis Gallant's insights into her characters are achieved with breathtaking economy and rightness of detail. She is a terrifyingly good writer.
— Margaret Atwood

The irrefutable master of the short story in English. She is the standout. She is the standard-bearer.
— Fran Lebowitz

One of the great story writers of our time.
— Michael Ondaatje

Also see:

Paris Stories By Mavis Gallant Selected and with an introduction by Michael Ondaatje Mysterious, funny, insightful, and heartbreaking, these are tales of expatriates and exiles, wise children and straying saints. Together they compose a secret history, at once intimate and panoramic, of modern times.

Varieties of Exile By Mavis Gallant Selected and with an introduction by Russell Banks Mavis Gallant is the modern master of what Henry James called the international story, the fine-grained evocation of the qualms and quandaries of people who, whether from choice or necessity, have no place to call home.

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