The Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories - Hardcover

Gallant, Mavis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 140880610X ISBN 13: 9781408806104

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2009

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Product 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, this title reveals a writer coming into her own.

Review:

`Gallant is often cited at one of the best living short-story writers ... She is one of the great chroniclers of exile, her fictional landscapes inhabited by misfits and lost souls, characters far from home, literally or emotionally' --Guardian

`One of the most gifted short story writers of the New Yorker's heyday - a master of the art in an age when fiction writers and poets could make a living from the form ... The Cost of Living is a rich gift of a collection ... near-perfect' --Financial Times

`[These stories are] little gems, perfectly cut and glittering, whichever way you turn them' --The Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 140880610X
• ISBN 13: 9781408806104
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 368