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Don't Cry (Vintage Contemporaries)by Mary Gaitskill
Review-A-Day"The culture has caught up with Mary Gaitskill, and she's not happy about it. 'Things are not like they once were,' a journalist says in Don't Cry, an awkwardly self-conscious new collection that seems to represent something of an artistic midlife crisis. 'Sex and the City is on TV.'" William Deresiewicz, The Nation (read the entire Nation review) Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments:Mary Gaitskill returns with a luminous new collection of stories — her first in more than ten years. In "College Town 1980", 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. 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 has come to be seen as stunningly emblematic of Gaitskill's fiction. Review:"A grab bag of 10 stories spotlight the writhing of Gaitskill's (Veronica) listless characters within unloving landscapes. In the portrayal of a depressive 29-year-old graduate student trying to pick up her life after a shattering breakup, "College Town, 1980," set in Ann Arbor, encapsulates the collective self-abnegation that seized America's young on the cusp of the Reagan revolution. "The Agonized Face" is a rigorous critique of a feminist author who manipulates her audience "with her sullied, catastrophic life placed before us for the purpose of selling her." Mostly, though, characters give in to nostalgia rather than anger, like the medical technician in "A Dream of Men" whose bittersweet memories of her dying father mingle with her ambivalence about her sexuality; or a now-married middle-aged writer's touching encounter with a stylish former lesbian lover she had 15 years before. The title story's protagonist, a recent widow accompanying her friend to adopt a baby in an unstable Addis Ababa, is nearly submerged by her guilt at having been once unfaithful to her husband, but like others in Gaitskill's pristinely rendered yet joyless gallery, she finds visceral gratitude in unexpected moments." Publishers Weekly (Copyright © Reed Business Information, Inc. All rights reserved.) Review:"No writer understands and gratifies the voyeurism inherent in reading fiction better than Mary Gaitskill.... [She] commands her readers' attention as few fiction writers can." New York Times Review:"Gaitskill has a rare talent for uncovering, with a near-impossible combination of compassion and pitilessness, what lies beneath the surfaces we work hard to make placid...an American original." Kirkus Reviews About the AuthorMary Gaitskill is the author of Because They Wanted To (nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award) and the novel Two Girls, Fat and Thin. Veronica was nominated for the National Book Award. Gaitskill is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. She lives in New York. What Our Readers Are SayingAdd a comment for a chance to win!Average customer rating based on 1 comment:
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