Gallantly

Mavis Gallant was stunningly prolific, with 116 stories in The New Yorker alone. Of the two dozen books she published, nine are curated selections with titles like Paris Stories and Montreal Stories (there is some repetition among them). Despite persistent if haphazard attempts at cataloguing her fiction, much has escaped the anthologists. The American novelist Garth Risk Hallberg, an ardent Gallant fan, has assembled a definitive edition of “uncollected stories”— meaning either that they have never been included in a book or that they were not chosen for the 1996 compilation, The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant.

Hallberg found one explanation for the many stray, ungathered stories in an editorial note by Gallant’s Canadian publisher, Douglas Gibson. Before she died in 2014, they had been in conversation about bringing out another collected volume, since “hundreds of pages had been cut” from the first. Hallberg’s entries...