The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant

The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant

Edited by Garth Risk Hallberg

New York Review of Books Classics 2025

One of the latest entries in the expansive roster of the NYRB Classics line is a scrappy, contentious winner: a new collection of the short stories of the great Mavis Gallant. Bestselling novelist and critical darling Garth Risk Hallberg has gathered The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant and provided a 20-page Introduction that attempts in part to address the question that hangs over virtually every “uncollected stories” volume of this kind: basically, where does some editor get off presuming to assemble stories the author herself never saw fit to assemble while she was alive?

The big, glorious Collected Stories came out in the mid-1990s, the product of Gallant’s own careful picking and choosing. Halberg is right in pointing out the frustration of multiple story collections littering an author’s past; stories that might have been included in Paris Stories might not have been included in Varieties of Exile, and some of those might have been excluded from the Collected Stories … so that eventually, there’s a significant number of stories that have fallen by the wayside, for reasons of space on a Table of Contents or for Gallant’s own imperious scorn, and some of these stories might nevertheless be “by turns droll, dreamy, casually devastating” – what Halberg refers to as “pure-D Mavis.” Faced with such a situation, can a later editor avoid accusations of presumption? Halberg ponders:

Gallant is no longer around to answer my questions. She had died in 2014, at ninety-one. Yer as I watched the centenary of her birth approach and then pass without fanfare, a larger and more consequential question seemed to loom. Might returning the lost work to print somehow blemish the record of perfection she’d left behind? Or conversely, might the uncollected stories of Mavis Gallant – whatever story lay behind them – do something to burnish the legacy of this great artist, revered among her readers but to others, unconscionably, a stranger?

It's difficult to avoid the impression that Halberg considers himself pretty damn conscionable, but his opening essay is characteristically gripping prose, telling the story of Gallant’s long experience submitting essays to the New Yorker, gradually reaching the always-sympathetic reading eye of William Maxwell, who dispensed rejections but also gradually more acceptances – and praise, which Halberg is probably right in assuming would have been enormously appreciated by Gallant:

The mode of honest praise is one of the hardest to master, skating close as it does to insincerity, or to fawning. Still, some of the most memorable passages in the Maxwell oeuvre are his attempts to capture his spontaneous effusions for the work of Mavis Gallant. “This all takes place between the eyeball and the eyelid,” he writes in 1963. “Do you know how good it is?” And wonderfully out of the blue, in another letter: “Make me happy, send me a story.”

And after Maxwell and Halberg and Gallant herself, the final arbiter of any volume like this will be the stories themselves, and they’re mostly, as it were, pure-D Mavis. At no point will readers feel like they’re reading down-market cast-offs, far from it: every story here bristles and castigates and dreams in purely quintessential Gallant fashion, from the shorter bits to the 80-page “Its Image in the Mirror,” where beautiful moments crop up as regularly as little sunrises:

It was plain and simple: She was in trouble and needed me. Pretend I had never circled her life, been the stranger on the street, afraid to meet the eyes of another stranger looking out. “Afraid” is too loud, too. There remains Isobel, then, cheek on hand, a little tired. I remain bolt upright in bed, hugging my knees. Forget despair, fear. We were very ordinary. Leave us there, with the lamp like a ship and the anchors round the shade, and the map on the wall with the Empire in pink, and my sister and I at opposite ends of the bed, with our childhoods between us going on to the horizon without a break.

The cover of The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant features an out-of-focus photo of an older Gallant looking peaked and pre-emptively disapproving. But as Halberg helpfully pointed out, she’s dead – and this volume very much deserves its spot next to the big Collected Stories. Kudos to the NYRB people for this one.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News