Don't Cry: Stories - Hardcover

Gaitskill, Mary

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375424199 ISBN 13: 9780375424199

Publisher: Pantheon Books, 2009

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

This new collection shows one of the great American writers continuing to evolve, proving that she can surprise as well as shock. (Sunday Times)

No writer understands and gratifies the voyeurism inherent in reading fiction better than Mary Gaitskill... Gaitskill writes with visceral power, with what sometimes feels like an exultantly destructive energy... They don't require suspense building toward a crisis and denouement, because they hold our attention with the promise of revealing what is ordinarily hidden from view.
Hold it fiercely. Glimpses of what characters would forbid us to see are seductive, immediately involving. They insist we keep looking, just as we would at a car wreck; keep eavesdropping, as we would on a couple fighting next door; keep reading, as we would a diary left open by accident. The fierce artistry of Gaitskill's writing, its weirdly graceful introduction of the sublime into the sordid

(Kathryn Harrison New York Times)

Gaitskill's prose is conceptual, clean-limbed and immediate... The media still presents sex, despite progressive gestures, in such a limited, codified way that to read an author who takes it seriously, as one of the soul's deep concerns, is an experience to savour (Vidyan Ravinthiran Daily Telegraph)

Gaitskill is good at the throb and pop of cities and populates her stories with startling ugly-beautiful sentences. (Observer)

Economical, intimate and unsparing, the story's control of perspective and acuity of insight give it the rich, satisfying feel of a novel. (Press Association)

Each of the stories in Don't Cry ... makes for similarly hazardous reading, fractured with faultlines, traps for the unsteady reader ... in probing the unseemly, Gaitskill sees what others can't ... sentences throughout prickle with a similar tactile electricity, whether it's the soft glow of nostalgia ... brimming with this sensual and soothing disquiet, these stories are impossible to ignore. (Financial Times)

Compelling (Houman Barekat Spectator)

This new collection shows one of the great American writers continuing to evolve, proving that she can surprise as well as shock (Sunday Times)

Praise for Mary Gaitskill: Gaitskill's work feels more real than real life and reading her leads to a place that feels like a sacred space. (Boston Globe)

Both stripped-bare fragile and 'fuck you' tough. (Dazed & Confused)

Book Description:

DON'T CRY is Mary Gaitskill's first collection of stories in over ten years, following her previous acclaimed collections, BAD BEHAVIOUR and BECAUSE THEY WANTED TO

About this edition

• Publisher: Pantheon Books
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0375424199
• ISBN 13: 9780375424199
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 226