Mavis Gallant at the Village Voice Bookshop

Mavis Gallant in Paris in the 1950s.

This Thursday at 7pm, the legendary Canadian writer Mavis Gallant, will deliver a reading from her new book The Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories. The event will take place at the Village Voice Bookshop at 6, rue Princesse, Paris 6. Mavis Gallant is an acclaimed writer who contributes regularly in The New Yorker. The Cost of Living.... is an extensive new sampling of Gallant's short stories written between 1951 and 1971. The stories are set in locations as diverse as Quebec, postwar Europe, New York, New England during the Mad Man era, Germany, French Riviera and finally Paris, where Gallant has resided for many years.

Jhumpa Lahiri, who wrote an introduction tho The Cost of Living asserts that Malvis Gallant is "one of the greatest literary artists of her time." John Updike agrees, "Mavis Gallant's talent is as versatile and witty as it is somber and empathetic."Gallant's stories are at once satirical, lyrical, passionate and skeptical, perfectly calibrated and in constant motion, brilliantly capturing the fatal untidiness of life. As Alberto Mangue writes, "We come away from her stories with a keener knowledge of ourselves."