Mary Gaitskill – författare

Mary Gaitskill's tales of desire and dislocation in 1980s New York caused a sensation with their frank, caustic portrayals of men and women's inner lives. As her characters have sex, try and fail to connect, play power games and inflict myriad cruelties on each other, she skewers urban life with precision and candour.'Stubbornly original, with a sort of rhythm and fine moments that flatten you out when you don't expect it, these stories are a pleasure to read' Alice Munro'An air of Pinteresque menace hangs over these people's social exchanges like black funereal bunting ... Gaitskill writes with such authority, such radar-perfect detail' Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

'A perfectly formed set of stories about alienation in modern times' Independent'Mesmerizing - almost ecstatic' The New York TimesMary Gaitskill's coolly compelling, quietly devastating stories explore the messy complexity of relationships between lovers, families and friends. An unsettling encounter on a plane; a tentative affair between an older woman and a younger man; the chasm between a father and his daughter: each expresses our longing for, and our fear of, human connection.

The intense, caustically funny first novel from the bestselling author of Bad Behaviour'Dark, menacing and original' Joanna Briscoe, GuardianDorothy Never - fat - lives alone in New York, eats and works the night shift as a proofreader. Justine Shade - thin - is a freelance journalist who sleeps with unsuitable men. Both are isolated. Both are damaged by their pasts. When Justine interviews Dorothy about her involvement with an infamous and charismatic philosophical guru, the two women are drawn together with an intense magnetism that throws their lives off balance. Mary Gaitskill's first novel is an intense, darkly funny and caustic portrayal of loneliness and the search for intimacy.'What makes her scary, and what makes her exciting, is her ability to evoke the hidden life, the life unseen, the life we don't even know we are living' Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

Mary Gaitskill's tales of desire and dislocation in 1980s New York caused a sensation with their frank, caustic portrayals of men and women's inner lives. As her characters have sex, try and fail to connect, play power games and inflict myriad cruelties on each other, she skewers urban life with precision and candour.'Stubbornly original, with a sort of rhythm and fine moments that flatten you out when you don't expect it, these stories are a pleasure to read' Alice Munro'An air of Pinteresque menace hangs over these people's social exchanges like black funereal bunting ... Gaitskill writes with such authority, such radar-perfect detail' Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

'A perfectly formed set of stories about alienation in modern times' Independent'Mesmerizing - almost ecstatic' The New York TimesMary Gaitskill's coolly compelling, quietly devastating stories explore the messy complexity of relationships between lovers, families and friends. An unsettling encounter on a plane; a tentative affair between an older woman and a younger man; the chasm between a father and his daughter: each expresses our longing for, and our fear of, human connection.

The intense, caustically funny first novel from the bestselling author of Bad Behaviour'Dark, menacing and original' Joanna Briscoe, GuardianDorothy Never - fat - lives alone in New York, eats and works the night shift as a proofreader. Justine Shade - thin - is a freelance journalist who sleeps with unsuitable men. Both are isolated. Both are damaged by their pasts. When Justine interviews Dorothy about her involvement with an infamous and charismatic philosophical guru, the two women are drawn together with an intense magnetism that throws their lives off balance. Mary Gaitskill's first novel is an intense, darkly funny and caustic portrayal of loneliness and the search for intimacy.'What makes her scary, and what makes her exciting, is her ability to evoke the hidden life, the life unseen, the life we don't even know we are living' Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksA writer engulfed by a new obsession, an occasional sex-worker, a runaway, a teenager entering the workplace: these four tales of desire and dislocation explore the rough edges of relationships and the inner lives of women negotiating their precarious place in the world. In these coolly compelling and quietly devastating stories, Gaitskill evokes with razor-sharp precision the pleasure, pain, fear and longing that haunt modern life.

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. 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.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Following her National Book Award–nominated Veronica, here is Mary Gaitskill’s most poignant and powerful work yet—the story of a Dominican girl, the Anglo woman who introduces her to riding, and the horse who changes everything for her.   Velveteen Vargas is eleven years old, a Fresh Air Fund kid from Brooklyn. Her host family is a couple in upstate New York: Ginger, a failed artist and shakily recovered alcoholic, and her academic husband, Paul, who wonder what it will mean to “make a difference” in such a contrived situation. Gaitskill illuminates their shifting relationship with Velvet over several years, as well as Velvet’s  encounter with the horses at the stable down the road—especially with an abused, unruly mare called Fugly Girl. With strong supporting characters—Velvet’s abusive mother, an eccentric horse trainer, a charismatic older boy who awakens Velvet’s nascent passion—The Mare traces Velvet’s journey between the vital, violent world of the inner city and the world of the small-town stable.   In Gaitskill’s hands, the timeless story of a girl and a horse is joined with a timely story of people from different races and classes trying to meet one another honestly. The Mare is raw, heart-stirring, and original.From the Hardcover edition.

Engaging, unusual essays written over the last two decades on matters literary, social, cultural, and personal—from the explosive date-rape debates of the ’90s to the ubiquitous political adultery of the ’00s, from Anton Chekhov to Celine Dion. Here is Mary Gaitskill the essayist: witty, direct, penetrating to the core of each issue, personality, or literary trope (On Updike: “It’s as if [he] has entered a tiny window marked ‘Rabbit,’ and, by some inverse law, passed into a universe of energies both light and dark, expanded and contracted, infinite and workaday.” On Elizabeth Wurtzel: “If this kooky, foot-stamping, self-loathing screed is meant to be, as it claims, a defense of ‘difficult women,’ i.e., women who ‘write their own operating manuals’ . . . all I can say is, bitches best duck and run for cover.”) Gaitskill writes about the ridiculous and poetic ambition of Norman Mailer, about the sociosexual cataclysm embodied by porn star Linda Lovelace, and, in the deceptively titled “Lost Cat,” about how power and race can warp the most innocent and intimate of relationships. Appearing in chronological order, the essays offer Gaitskill''s thoughts and reactions, always with the same heat-seeking, revelatory understanding that we have long valued in her fiction.From the Hardcover edition.

A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” Selection   It was the first autumn of the Iraq War, when Ella saw Dani again. “Today I’m Yours” is a story of seduction and layered memory, a love affair fifteen years past but not forgotten—from the author of the National Book Award nominated and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Veronica.    Mary Gaitskill is widely acclaimed as a caustically sharp observer of American culture high and low, of bodily temptations and sensual intelligence. A selection from Gaitskill’s story collection, Don’t Cry, a New York Times Notable Book.   An eBook short.

A collection of startling and breathtaking stories about people struggling with the disparity between what they want and what they know.A New York Times Notable Book A man tells a story to a woman sitting beside him on a plane, little suspecting what it reveals about his capacity for cruelty and contempt. A callow runaway girl is stranded in a strange city with another woman’s fractiously needy children. An uncomprehending father helplessly lashes out at the daughter he both loves and resents. In these raw, startling, and incandescently lovely stories, the author of Veronica yields twelve indelible portraits of people struggling with the disparity between what they want and what they know. Because They Wanted To is further evidence that Gaitskill is one of the fiercest, funniest, and most subversively compassionate writers at work today.

Starting with Bad Behavior in the 1980s, Mary Gaitskill has been writing about gender relations with searing, even prophetic honesty. In This Is Pleasure, she considers our present moment through the lens of a particular #MeToo incident.   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, Gaitskill creates a nuanced tragicomedy, one that reveals her characters as whole persons—hurtful and hurting, infuriating and touching, and always deeply recognizable.   Gaitskill has said that fiction is the only way that she could approach this subject because it is too emotionally faceted to treat in the more rational essay form. Her compliment to her characters—and to her readers—is that they are unvarnished and real. Her belief in our ability to understand them, even when we don’t always admire them, is a gesture of humanity from one of our greatest contemporary writers.

A bewitching collage of fiction, memoir, essay, criticism, and visual art from an author unique in her “ability to evoke the hidden life, the life unseen, the life we don’t even know we are living.” (Parul Seghal, New York Times Magazine)In The Devil's Treasure—aptly subtitled A Book of Stories and Dreams—the iconic author Mary Gaitskill has created a chimerical hybrid of fiction, memoir, essay, criticism, and visual art that transcends categorization. This collage of four novels (one a work in progress), interspersed and thematically linked by a single short story, then woven together with the author's commentary, is a kind of director's cut revealing the personal and societal forces that went into each individual piece of work, an ongoing, passionate exploration of core human emotions and experience—the ideally, sometimes quixotically high, and the grossly, confusedly low.With the stylistic daring and preternatural acuity that has made her one of America's most original writers, Gaitskill has created a layered vision of modern life that simultaneously blends the huge prehistoric creatures that swim at the bottom of our collective ocean with the family that picnics on the beach while the podcast natters about politics and a perhaps dangerously curious child explores the lapping waves.

A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 100 BOOK OF THE 21ST CENTURYAlison and Veronica meet amid the nocturnal glamour of 1980s New York: one is a former modelling sensation, stumbling away from the wreck of her career, the other an eccentric middle-aged proofreader with a meticulous eye. Over the next twenty years their friendship will encompass narcissism and tenderness, exploitation and self-sacrifice, love and mortality. Moving seamlessly between the glamorous and gritty '80s, when beauty and style gave licence to excess, and the broken world of the decade's survivors twenty years later, Gaitskill casts a fierce yet compassionate eye on the two eras and their fixations. Veronica masterfully evokes the fragility and mystery of human relationships in a world where love is rife with frightening artificiality. Evocative, raw and entirely unique, Veronica was shortlisted for the prestigious 2005 National Book Award in the USA.

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2017 BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTIONGinger is in her forties and a recovering alcoholic when she meets and marries Paul. When it becomes clear it's too late for her to have a baby of her own, she tries to persuade him to consider adoption, but he already has a child from a previous marriage and is ten years older than her, so doesn't share her longing to be a parent at any cost. As a compromise, they sign up to an organisation that sends poor inner-city kids to stay with country families for a few weeks in the summer, and so one hot July day eleven year old Velveteen Vargas, a Dominican girl from one of Brooklyn's toughest neighbourhoods, arrives in their lives, and Ginger is instantly besotted. Bemused by her gentle middle-aged hosts, but deeply intuitive in the way of clever children, Velvet quickly senses the longing behind Ginger's rapturous attention. While Velvet returns her affection, she finds the intensity of it bewildering. Velvet's own passions are more excited by the stables nearby, where she discovers she has a natural talent for riding and a deep affinity with the damaged horses cared for there. But when Ginger begins to entertain fantasies of adopting her, things start to get complicated for everyone involved. This is a heartbreakingly honest and profoundly moving portrait of the nearly unbridgeable gaps between people, and the way we long for fairytale endings despite knowing that they don't exist.

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2017 WOMEN''S PRIZE FOR FICTION''Bold, dramatic and deeply unsettling'' GuardianWhen Velveteen Vargas, an eleven-year-old Fresh Air Fund kid from Brooklyn, comes to stay with a couple in upstate New York, what begins as a two-week visit blossoms into something much more significant. Soon Velvet finds herself torn between her hosts - Ginger, a failed artist and shakily recovered alcoholic and Paul, a college professor - and her own tormented mother.Ginger longs for a child of her own, but Paul continues to refuse. Bemused by her gentle middle-aged hosts, but deeply intuitive in the way of clever children, Velvet quickly senses the longing behind Ginger''s rapturous attention. Velvet''s one constant becomes her newly discovered passion for horse riding, and her affection for an abused, unruly mare.A profound and stirring novel about how love and family are shaped by place, race and class, The Mare is a stunning exploration of the sometimes unexpected but profound connections made throughout our lives.

''A writer of prodigious gifts'' GuardianFull of jagged, complex emotion and powerful, incisive writing, the stories in Don''t Cry are a testament to Mary Gaitskill''s incomparable excavation of character. ''An Old Virgin'' describes a nurse''s obsession with her forty-three-year-old patient''s virginity; ''Folk Song'' dissects the lives of people behind newspaper headlines, including a murderer who gives a prime-time interview and a woman attempting to break a world record by having sex with one thousand men; in the title story ''Don''t Cry'', a grieving widow reflects on her marriage whilst accompanying a friend on a journey to adopt an Ethiopian orphan during a violent election season; and a musician accidentally steals a girl''s soul during a one-night stand in the urban fable ''Mirrorball''. The provocative, searching stories of Don''t Cry remind us that no experiences should be taken lightly, but instead explored for their physical, emotional and even spiritual revelations.

''Gets deep under your skin ... Gaitskill is uniquely attuned to the moment.'' Sunday Times''Gaitskill achieves a superb feat. She distils the suffering, anger, reactivity, danger and social recalibration of the #MeToo movement into an extremely potent, intelligent and nuanced account.'' Sarah Hall, Guardian''I don''t know why I behaved the way I did, and I kept doing it; he kept doing it. And though I might once have easily brushed it away, suddenly I could not. Nor could I confront him. The conversation moved too quickly.''This is Pleasure is an extraordinary work by one of the world''s finest writers, and achieves more in 15,000 words than most full-length novels. Following the unravelling of the life of a male publisher undone by allegations of sexual impropriety and harassment, and the female friend who tries to understand, and explain, his actions, it looks unflinchingly at our present moment and rejects moral certainties to show us that there are many sides to every story. Mary Gaitskill has spent her whole career mining the complexity of human relationships on both an individual and societal scale with wisdom and grace. Here her insights are more piercing and timely than ever.

''Mary Gaitskill is willing to think about the problematic with complexity and humanity, and without taking sides or engaging in all the fashionable moral hectoring that passes for serious thought these days.'' Eimear McBrideNuanced, daring and tender, these essays from the celebrated author of This is Pleasure and Bad Behavior, consistently fascinate and provoke. Mary Gaitskill takes on a broad range of topics from Nabokov to horse-riding with her unique ability to tease out unexpected truths and cast aside received wisdom. Written with startling grace and linguistic flair, and delving into the complicated nature of love and the responsibility we owe to the people we encounter, the work collected here inspires the reader to think beyond their first responses to life and art. Spanning thirty years of Mary Gaitskill''s writing, and covering subjects as diverse as Dancer in the Dark, the world of Charles Dickens and the Book of Revelation with her characteristic blend of sincerity and wit, Oppositions is never less than enthralling.

'Gets deep under your skin ... Gaitskill is uniquely attuned to the moment.' Sunday Times'Gaitskill achieves a superb feat. She distils the suffering, anger, reactivity, danger and social recalibration of the #MeToo movement into an extremely potent, intelligent and nuanced account.' Sarah Hall, Guardian'I don't know why I behaved the way I did, and I kept doing it; he kept doing it. And though I might once have easily brushed it away, suddenly I could not. Nor could I confront him. The conversation moved too quickly.'This is Pleasure is an extraordinary work by one of the world's finest writers, and achieves more in 15,000 words than most full-length novels. Following the unravelling of the life of a male publisher undone by allegations of sexual impropriety and harassment, and the female friend who tries to understand, and explain, his actions, it looks unflinchingly at our present moment and rejects moral certainties to show us that there are many sides to every story. Mary Gaitskill has spent her whole career mining the complexity of human relationships on both an individual and societal scale with wisdom and grace. Here her insights are more piercing and timely than ever.

'Mary Gaitskill is willing to think about the problematic with complexity and humanity, and without taking sides or engaging in all the fashionable moral hectoring that passes for serious thought these days.' Eimear McBrideNuanced, daring and tender, these essays from the celebrated author of This is Pleasure and Bad Behavior, consistently fascinate and provoke. Mary Gaitskill takes on a broad range of topics from Nabokov to horse-riding with her unique ability to tease out unexpected truths and cast aside received wisdom. Written with startling grace and linguistic flair, and delving into the complicated nature of love and the responsibility we owe to the people we encounter, the work collected here inspires the reader to think beyond their first responses to life and art. Spanning thirty years of Mary Gaitskill's writing, and covering subjects as diverse as Dancer in the Dark, the world of Charles Dickens and the Book of Revelation with her characteristic blend of sincerity and wit, Oppositions is never less than enthralling.

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2017 WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION'Bold, dramatic and deeply unsettling' GuardianWhen Velveteen Vargas, an eleven-year-old Fresh Air Fund kid from Brooklyn, comes to stay with a couple in upstate New York, what begins as a two-week visit blossoms into something much more significant. Soon Velvet finds herself torn between her hosts - Ginger, a failed artist and shakily recovered alcoholic and Paul, a college professor - and her own tormented mother.Ginger longs for a child of her own, but Paul continues to refuse. Bemused by her gentle middle-aged hosts, but deeply intuitive in the way of clever children, Velvet quickly senses the longing behind Ginger's rapturous attention. Velvet's one constant becomes her newly discovered passion for horse riding, and her affection for an abused, unruly mare.A profound and stirring novel about how love and family are shaped by place, race and class, The Mare is a stunning exploration of the sometimes unexpected but profound connections made throughout our lives.

'A writer of prodigious gifts' GuardianFull of jagged, complex emotion and powerful, incisive writing, the stories in Don't Cry are a testament to Mary Gaitskill's incomparable excavation of character.'An Old Virgin' describes a nurse's obsession with her forty-three-year-old patient's virginity; 'Folk Song' dissects the lives of people behind newspaper headlines, including a murderer who gives a prime-time interview and a woman attempting to break a world record by having sex with one thousand men; in the title story 'Don't Cry', a grieving widow reflects on her marriage whilst accompanying a friend on a journey to adopt an Ethiopian orphan during a violent election season; and a musician accidentally steals a girl's soul during a one-night stand in the urban fable 'Mirrorball'.The provocative, searching stories of Don't Cry remind us that no experiences should be taken lightly, but instead explored for their physical, emotional and even spiritual revelations.