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Pantheon
April 2009
On Sale: March 24, 2009
240 pages
ISBN: 0375424199
EAN: 9780375424199
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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.
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