Mary Gaitskill: Mary Gaitskill

Features the Gaitskill story, "The Other Place"

Includes Gaitskill's "The Wolf in the Tall Grass"

Includes Gaitskill's "The Little Boy"

Includes the Gaitskill piece, "Tiny, Smiling Daddy"

Includes the Mary Gaitskill story, "Comfort"

Contains the Gaitskill story, "The Blanket"

Includes the Gaitskill story, "A Romantic Weekend"

Following the extraordinary success of her novel Veronica, Mary Gaitskill returns with a luminous new collection of stories--her first in more than ten years. In College Town l980, young people adrift in Ann Arbor debate the meaning of personal strength at the start of the Reagan era; in the urban fairy tale Mirrorball, a young man steals a girl's soul during a one-night stand; in The Little Boy, a woman haunted by the death of her former husband is finally able to grieve through a mysterious encounter with a needy child; and in The Arms and Legs of the Lake, the fallout of the Iraq war becomes disturbingly real for the disparate passengers on a train going up the Hudson--three veterans, a liberal editor, a soldier's uncle, and honeymooners on their way to Niagara Falls. Each story delivers the powerful, original language, and the dramatic engagement of the intelligent mind with the craving body--or of the intelligent body with the craving mind--that is characteristic of Gaitskill's fiction. As intense as Bad Behavior, her first collection of stories, Don't Cry reflects the profound enrichment of life experience. As the stories unfold against the backdrop of American life over the last thirty years, they describe how our social conscience has evolved while basic human truths--the crude cinder blocks of male and female down in the basement, holding up the house, as one character puts it--remain unchanged. From the Hardcover edition.

A trade paperback reissue of National Book Award finalist Mary Gaitskill's debut collection, Bad Behavior-powerful stories about dislocation, longing, and desire which depict a disenchanted and rebellious urban fringe generation that is searching for human connection. - Now a classic: Bad Behavior made critical waves when it first published, heralding Gaitskill's arrival on the literary scene and her establishment as one of the sharpest, erotically charged, and audaciously funny writing talents of contemporary literature. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times called it "Pinteresque," saying, "Ms. Gaitskill writes with such authority, such radar-perfect detail, that she is able to make even the most extreme situations seem real... her reportorial candor, uncompromised by sentimentality or voyeuristic charm...underscores the strength of her debut."

Alison and Veronica meet amid the nocturnal glamour of 1980s New York: One is a young model stumbling away from the wreck of her career, the other an eccentric middle-aged office temp. Over the next twenty years their friendship will encompass narcissism and tenderness, exploitation and self-sacrifice, love and mortality. Moving seamlessly from present and past, casting a fierce yet compassionate eye on two eras and their fixations, the result is a work of timeless depth and moral power.

"Gaitskill's complex, urgent characters struggle with the disparity between what they want and what they know. Longing for emotional connection, they often mistake debasement for passion, manipulation for affection, cruelty for intensity. In "Tiny, Smiling Daddy," a father suffers his ambivalent love for a daughter who has betrayed him - perhaps justly. In "The Girl on the Plane," a disillusioned salesman must face his participation in a brutal act he has almost forgotten. In "Kiss and Tell," a writer seeks revenge on a woman who rejected him, only to find that once he has achieved it, he no longer wants it. In "The Wrong Thing," a lonely, emotionally injured woman involved in a set of skewed, apparently trivial sexual encounters unexpectedly discovers her own life-giving reserve of humility, gentleness, and compassion."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

DVD of film based on story in Gaitskill's Bad Behavior collection