Tessa Hadley at the LRB:
It isn’t necessarily a good thing when a publisher brings out a writer’s uncollected stories. More is sometimes less. Barrels are scraped, doubts – often the writer’s own, if she or he is no longer around – are set aside; these stories may not have been collected for good reason, and reading someone’s weaker attempts can dilute the power of the rest. The failures give away the writer’s workings – the swan’s feet paddling hard under the assured surface – which can be disenchanting, at least temporarily. There’s no such problem, however, with this thick volume of Mavis Gallant’s Uncollected Stories, which brings together everything left out of the various collections and selections published over the last thirty years. There are 44 stories here and hardly any duds or clumsy landings. (Apparently – wise woman – Gallant threw a lot of work in the waste basket in ‘shreds’.) Each is so good that you have to pace yourself, recalling Gallant’s own admonition in her introduction to the Everyman edition of her Collected Stories: ‘Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.’ She’s right, but it’s easy for her to say. Temptation lies in wait for the unwary reader in every beginning of a new story.
more here.
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