Mary Gaitskill

A young woman anxiously waits for her date on a street corner in New York City; he sits in a pizza parlour across the street, watching her discomfort. A middle-aged woman returns to a New York that is haunted by the passion and intensity of her former relationship with her estranged best friend. A secretarial graduate starts her first job at a lawyer's office and quietly keeps her cruel experiences at his hands locked inside herself. The stories in this collection peer deep into the inner lives of men and women, explore the cavernous spaces between what we say and what can be expressed, and are full of tenderness and cruelty. Published for the first time in Penguin Modern Classics, Bad Behaviour provides a devastatingly insightful and urgently necessary view of our times.

Bad Behavior

"In this powerful short fiction, Mary Gaitskill--whose searing honesty about gender relations has been legendary since the appearance of Bad Behavior in the 1980s--considers our moment through the lens of a particular #metoo incident. The effervescent and well-dressed Quin, a successful book editor and fixture on the New York arts scene, has long been one of Margot's best friends. When several women in his field accuse him of inappropriate touching and remarks, Gaitskill builds the account of his undoing through Quin and Margot's alternating voices, allowing readers to experience Quin as a whole person--one whose behavior toward women could be hurtful and presumptuous on the one hand, and keenly supportive on the other. Margot, an older woman who alternately despairs of and sympathizes with the positions of the younger women involved in Quin's case, is the thrumming engine of this remarkable piece of truthtelling. As Gaitskill has said, fiction is the only way that she could approach this subject, which she sees as subtly colored in shades of gray, rather than the black and white of our current conversations. 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 beacon of humanity from one of our greatest contemporary writers"--

A Story

This Is Pleasure

'Last year I lost my cat Gattino. He was very young, at seven months barely an adolescent. He is probably dead but I don't know for certain.'

On a writing retreat in Italy, Mary Gaitskill rescued a stray cat and promptly fell in love with him. When she returned to the US, she took him to live with her and he settled happily into his new home. Then one afternoon while out in the garden, he disappeared.

While interrogating the unexpected trauma of her loss, Gaitskill is reminded of another close relationship. A few years earlier, she and her husband had begun to foster two siblings, Caesar and Natalia, who spent summers and holidays with them. As she considers the joys and ultimate difficulties of this experience, Gaitskill offers a frank and moving examination of love, security and fear.

In this unforgettable work of memoir, Gaitskill applies her razor-sharp writing to her most personal subjects yet.

Lost Cat

A Novel

Veronica

From the author of the National Book Award–nominated Veronica: Mary Gaitskill's most poignant and powerful work yet—the story of a Dominican girl, the white 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 on the fringe of Alcoholics Anonymous, and Paul, an academic who wonders what it will mean to “make a difference” in such a contrived situation. The Mare illuminates the couple's changing relationship with Velvet over the course of several years, as well as Velvet's powerful encounter with the horses at the stable down the road, as Gaitskill weaves together Velvet's vital inner-city community and the privileged country world of Ginger and Paul. The timeless story of a girl and a horse is joined with the timeless story of people from different races and socioeconomic backgrounds trying to meet one another honestly in a novel that is raw, striking, and completely original.

The Mare

Bad Behaviour

In essays on matters literary, social, cultural, and personal, Mary Gaitskill explores date rape and political adultery, the transcendentalism of the Talking Heads, the melancholy of Björk, and the playfulness of artist Laurel Nakadate. She celebrates the clownish grandiosity and the poetry of Norman Mailer?s long career and maps the sociosexual cataclysm embodied by porn star Linda Lovelace. Witty, wide-ranging, tender, and beautiful, Somebody with a Little Hammer displays the same heat-seeking, revelatory understanding for which Gaitskill?s writing has always been known.

Essays

Somebody with a Little Hammer

Shares a collection of stories about people who do not quite know what they want and whose wants conflict with their deeper needs and moral sense of the world

Stories

Because They Wanted To

Reissued to coincide with the paperback publication of "Because They Wanted To", this captivating novel shimmers with dark intensity and wicked wit. In a stunning synthesis of eroticism, rage, pathos, and humor, Gaitskill's "fine storyteller's pace and brilliant metaphors" ("The New York Times Book Review") create a haunting and unforgettable journey into the dark side of contemporary life and the deepest recesses of the soul.

Two Girls, Fat and Thin

The friendship between Alison, a young woman struggling with her ruined career as a fashion model, and Veronica, an older eccentric and proofreader, survives Alison's return to the world of fashion and Veronica's battle with AIDS.

stories

Don't cry

Bear Witness

Don't Cry

A 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.

Secretary

Marlene Van Niekerk

"I was immediately mesmerized . . . as brilliant as it is haunting." --Toni Morrison

Agaat

The Devil's Treasure

»Gaitskill verdient ein Denkmal für diesen schönen, niederschmetternden Roman.« Elle. Alison und Veronica lernen sich im nächtlichen Glamour des New York der 1980er Jahre kennen: ein Topmodel nach dramatischem Karriere-Aus und eine exzentrische Korrekturleserin mittleren Alters. Im Laufe der nächsten zwanzig Jahre muss die Freundschaft dieser ungleichen Frauen Narzissmus und Zärtlichkeit, Ausbeutung und Selbstaufopferung, Liebe und Tod aushalten. Gaitskill bewegt sich nahtlos zwischen den leuchtenden und den düsteren Seiten der Metropole, wo Schönheit und Stil dem Exzess Vorschub leisten, und der Welt der Überlebenden, die zwanzig Jahre später vor den Scherben ihres Daseins stehen. Meisterhaft beschwört »Veronica« die Zerbrechlichkeit und das Geheimnis menschlicher Beziehungen. Aufwühlend, unerschrocken und schmerzlich schön. Shortlist für den National Book Award. »Gaitskills Figuren bluten, schwitzen, weinen, und sie erleben Traurigkeit, Wut und Liebe ebenso stark als körperliche Empfindung wie als Emotion.« San Francisco Chronicle.

Roman

A rare work of criticism, memoir, and mythography from an author “aware of all the hidden chambers of the heart.” (Greil Marcus, New York Times Magazine) Mary Gaitskill is unique among American novelists in “her ability to evoke the hidden life, the life unseen, the life we don’t even know we are living.”* In this searching biography of the writer’s imagination, Gaitskill excavates her own novels, revealing their origins and obsessions, the personal and societal pressures that formed them, and the life story hidden between their pages. Using the techniques of collage, The Devil's Treasure splices fiction together with commentary and personal history, and with the fairy tale that gives the book its title, about a little girl who ventures into Hell through a suburban cellar door. The result is an answer to Gaitskill’s critics and, simultaneously, the best book we have about contemporary fiction, the forces ranged against it, and the forces that bring it into being. “Even among other artists attracted to weakness as a theme, [Gaitskill] is rare in being able to look at it on its own terms. She doesn’t treat it like a curiosity, like Diane Arbus, or a chink in the armor that might let in faith, like Flannery O’Connor. She isn’t afraid of it, like Muriel Spark; nor does she insist its depictions rouse us to action, like Sontag. She looks—just looks—and sees everything.” —Parul Seghal, New York Times Magazine*

Mary Gaitskill

About

Books

Join the club