The Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories

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I HAPPENED to have the privilege of interviewing Mavis Gallant while the present collection was being assembled. Sitting with her in February 2009 at the Village Voice Bookshop in Paris, I asked how she thought her stories, published over the course of half a century, had changed. “I don’t compare,” she replied. “It’s just a straight line to me.” To prove her point, she briefly lifted, with her fingers, an apricot-colored necklace that rested against her chest. “They’re like the beads on this.”

The twenty stories here were published during the first twenty years of Gallant’s career, between 1951 and 1971. They were written prior to the age of fifty; she turned eighty-seven just as this volume went to press. Many are culled from her first two collections, The Other Paris (1956) and My Heart Is Broken (1964), and also from In Transit, which was published in the late Eighties but contains earlier work. One story, originally published in The New Yorker, is a chapter from her first novel, Green Water, Green Sky (1959). In fact, all but three of these stories initially appeared in The New Yorker. None were included in The Collected Stories, published in 1996, which compiled only a fraction of Gallant’s work, and a good third of them have never been collected in a book at all. They are arranged in chronological order. The earliest, “Madeline’s Birthday,” was published in The New Yorker on September 1, 1951. It is among more than one hundred stories by Gallant that the magazine would accept.

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