The Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories. Mavis Gallant

I remember my mother speaking of Mavis Gallant as she read the author's stories in The New Yorker. She was onto a good thing that took me much longer to realize. Gallant's writing reminds me of Yates and Cheever. This collection takes us all over including Montreal, New York, and Paris. My favorites were Madeline's Birthday, Thieves and Rascals, and Bernadette. The stories are melancholy, if not sad, but there is an intriguing humour in every one of them. A word of warning, the introduction is a wonderful tribute to Gallant by Jhumpa Lahiri but is so detailed that I wished I had read it after reading the stories themselves (the title of this review is taken from that Introduction).