The Cost of Living

Early and Uncollected Stories

Mavis Gallant author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Published:15th Nov '10

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The Cost of Living cover

The great witty, perceptive and irreverent 87-year-old author will do interviews from the Village Voice bookshop and the Dome Cafe in Paris With an introduction by Jhumpa Lahiri, Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Namesake and Unaccustomed Earth

'In this collection, we witness the miracle of a great writer's birth and brisk maturation, a blossoming incapable of withering, and that remains masterful and truthful today' Jhumpa LahiriMavis 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.

'Gallant is one of the great short-story writers of our time' Michael Ondaatje 'The irrefutable master of the short story in English, Mavis Gallant has, among her colleagues, many admirers but no peer. She is the standout. She is the standard-bearer. She is the standar Fran Lebowitz 'Mavis Gallant is a marvellously clear-headed observer, and a rare phrase-maker' Times Literary Supplement 'Gallant is funny, exacting and stern - in fact, an old-fashioned moralist, luminescent, subtle and lasting. Gallant's chronicles of internal and external exile are a fitting tribute to a diasporic century' Guardian

ISBN: 9781408808498

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

368 pages