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Mary Gaitskill

Biography

Mary Gaitskill

Mary Gaitskill is the author of the story collections BAD BEHAVIOR, BECAUSE THEY WANTED TO (nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award) and DON'T CRY, and the novels VERONICA (nominated for a National Book Award) and TWO GIRLS, FAT AND THIN. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Artforum and Granta, among many other journals, as well as in The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories.

Mary Gaitskill

Books by Mary Gaitskill

by Mary Gaitskill - Fiction, Women's Fiction

The effervescent, well-dressed Quin, a successful book editor and fixture on the New York arts scene, has been accused of repeated unforgivable transgressions toward women in his orbit. But are they unforgivable? And who has the right to forgive him? To Quin’s friend Margot, the wrongdoing is less clear. Alternating Quin’s and Margot’s voices and perspectives, Mary Gaitskill creates a nuanced tragicomedy, one that reveals her characters as whole persons --- hurtful and hurting, infuriating and touching, and always deeply recognizable.

by Mary Gaitskill - Fiction

When Velveteen Vargas, an 11-year-old Fresh Air Fund kid from Brooklyn, comes to stay with a family in upstate New York, what begins as a two-week visit blossoms into something much more significant. Soon Velvet finds herself torn between her host family --- Ginger, a failed artist and shakily recovered alcoholic; and Paul, a college professor --- and her own deeply tormented mother. The one constant becomes Velvet’s newly discovered passion for horse riding --- and especially for an abused, unruly mare named Fugly Girl.

by Mary Gaitskill - Fiction, Short Stories

In “College Town I980,” 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.

by Mary Gaitskill - Fiction

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 20 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.