Don't Cry - Vintage Contemporaries by Mary Gaitskill Paperback

About the Book

First published: New York: Pantheon Books, 2009.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

A New York Times Notable Books

"A mindsearing, soul-rattling, gratitude-inducing collection."
--O, The Oprah Magazine

"Gaitskill writes with visceral power. . . . She commands her readers' attention as few fiction writers can."
--Kathryn Harrison, The New York Times Book Review

"Masterful. . . . Past, present, future; heartbreak, desire, and loss--none of it is quite beyond her. Gaitskill's prose glides lightly over unsoundable depths."
--The Village Voice

"Exquisite. . . . Gaitskill never stops at surfaces. . . . She believes--maybe reluctantly--in the absolute primacy of human connections, no matter what mess we tend to make of them."
--The Chicago Tribune

"Intense and thought-provoking, compelling and often tragic, yet filled with a subtle magic. . . . Gaitskill explores the spectrum of emotion: lust, greed, sorrow, hope, anger and many forms of love."
--Los Angeles Times

"Gaitskill is a fiercely emphatic writer--her concern always how close we can get to the pith of a protagonist or relationship--and Don't Cry is wonderfully Machiavellian in its excavation of character."
--San Francisco Chronicle

"Evocative yet efficient descriptions that remind you why you read in the first place. . . . Gaitskill never loses sight of her ambition to claim her readers' hearts. . . . With unpretentious yet heartbreaking lines. . . . Gaitskill owns you, and earns the right to put you through the ringer of vulgarity."
--Newsweek

"Gaitskill's short stories, with remarkably little prologue, routinely go far down and in deep. . . . She is, to be sure, one of the great living American fiction writers."
--The Buffalo News

"Gaitskill seems to have traveled through a lifetime of perception, moving in a progression from raw and violently sexualized to tender and regretful, with every character knowing the intimacy and exhaustion of sorrow."
--The Boston Globe

"Mary Gaitskill understands people. She doesn't patronize and she doesn't condemn. She simply focuses her insight into their characters, with rock-hard sympathy and beautiful prose."
--The Sunday Oregonian

"If Don't Cry finds Gaitskill older and wiser, it proves she's lost none of the honesty and inventiveness. On the contrary, maturity suits her well."
--South Florida Sun-Sentinel

"Savagely intelligent tales. . . . Gaitskill has consistently plumbed the farther reaches of psychic extremis with power and passion."
--Elle

"Gaitskill continues to deliver sharply defined visions of everyday lives that also manage to hum with a mysterious subconscious feedback."
--Time Out New York

"A deeply compassionate book. . . . Brave and even majestic. . . . In adult life we put things safely in categories. Gaitskill doesn't; won't. This is her project throughout the book: to remind us that people's experience ought not to be gainsaid. Experience ought to be explored and revealed. Physically, emotionally, and spiritually."
--Slate

"For all of Gaitskill's rough perspective on the world, she doesn't shield her heart from view. . . . [There's] a thread of poignancy and real warmth that keeps her work from becoming inaccessible."
--The Miami Herald

"Gaitskill knows how to pull open the trap door beneath the reader's feet, so that we drop from clever, supercilious dialogue and elegant description to something deeper. . . . She finds words for intimacy at its most inarticulate, in stories that jolt, seduce and disturb."
--The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

"Gaitskill's characters have never listened very well, and these stories are strewn with the wreckage of lost opportunities and broken lives that result invariably. [But] Don't Cry moves beyond showing us the spilled milk to ask why it's on the floor--and whether, next time, things might be different."
--The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

"A gathering of fiercely observed portraits of cultural unease, from the Reagan years to the early days of the Iraq War." --Vogue

"Gaitskill's m.o. is to follow her creations wherever they go--to places she didn't anticipate and may not full understand. She's ravenous for complexity."
--Bloomberg News

"Gaitskill takes up themes of yearning, grief and emotional vulnerability that will be familiar to her readers, but, this time, she imagines a broader landscape, rife with political turmoil. Gaitskill's emotional landscape is broader, too, and delicately nuanced. . . . Trust and shelter, recognition of one soul by another: In Gaitskill's world, these gifts--fragile, ephemeral, hard won--count as happiness."
--The San Diego Union-Tribune

"Don't Cry takes its place among artworks of great moral seriousness."
--BOMB Magazine

"Gaitskill is no coward. Comfort is more or less beyond the question here. Yet possibility lurks in every interstice. . . . Once again she plays with time, sliding past and present onto the same string like the beads of a darkly gorgeous necklace."
--The Cleveland Plain Dealer

About the Author

Mary Gaitskill is also 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.