Synopses & Reviews
This blistering new collection from literary rising star Stephen Elliott demonstrates once again why his books have been praised as "graceful," "soaring," and "fearless." As with all of Elliott's work, these stories have the raw ring of truth filtered through the author's downbeat-poetic sensibility.
My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up follows the narrator on a dizzying ride through past and present, from a group home for troubled adolescents in Chicago where he loses his virginity to shooting galleries and homeless encampments in San Francisco where he searches for deeper and darker thrills. In "Other Desires," a flood of unsettling memories backgrounds the narrator's involvement with a loose-knit family of lost souls. "Tears" explores the disturbing complexities of an S/M Internet hook-up. Several of the stories feature the enigmatic Eden, the narrator's polyamorous mistress. With My Girlfriend, Elliott confirms his status as a major young writer of a kind of literary fiction that recalls the work of Genet and Bukowski.
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"[A] profound, distilled work of art
drink it and be transformed." Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
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"Stephen Elliott knocks my fishnet stockings off." Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler's Wife
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"An amazing and beautiful and powerful book....I can't think of a more courageous writer than Stephen Elliott. At the center of these stories of his degradations is, I think, a rare kind of love. He is beaten until he weeps so that he can be held while he cries. But this book isn't all pathos and blood and sex it's also very funny. So Stephen Elliott can do it all he can freak you out and he can make you laugh. What more could you want from a writer?" Jonathan Ames, author of Wake Up, Sir!
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"Stephen Elliott describes the sexual and emotional terrain in a voice that is at once feral and sweet, straightforward and complicated, devastating and funny as hell." San Francisco Bay Guardian
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"There's an emotional courage to these stories, and a sense of urgency, that are thrilling to encounter. Elliott writes as if his life depended on each sentence." The Believer
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"[Elliott is] a master of muted prose....He conveys unmet yearning with a poignancy that is universal." San Francisco Chronicle