Mary Gaitskill

Stories

A re-release of a National Book Award finalist debut collection by the author of Because They Wanted To follows such themes as dislocation and longing in a series of tales that reflect the experiences of a disenchanted and rebellious urban-fringe generation. Reprint.

Bad Behavior

Like-new copy with a little very light edge wear, as pictured.

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Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Vermont

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.

Veronica

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Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Alabama

A Story

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.

This Is Pleasure

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A Guardian Book of the Year A Guardian Writers' Choice Book of the Year'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'The work of an expert iconoclast elegantly prising the lid from a can of worms.' Metro'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.

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Pennsylvania

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

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'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.'

Lost Cat

Maryland

Following the extraordinary success of her novel "Veronica," Gaitskill returns with a luminous new collection of stories--her first in more than 10 years.

Don't Cry

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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.

Texas

"Gaitskill's complex, urgent characters struggle with the disparity between what they want and what they know. Longing for emotional connection, they often mistake debasement for passion, manipulation for affection, cruelty for intensity. In "Tiny, Smiling Daddy," a father suffers his ambivalent love for a daughter who has betrayed him - perhaps justly. In "The Girl on the Plane," a disillusioned salesman must face his participation in a brutal act he has almost forgotten. In "Kiss and Tell," a writer seeks revenge on a woman who rejected him, only to find that once he has achieved it, he no longer wants it. In "The Wrong Thing," a lonely, emotionally injured woman involved in a set of skewed, apparently trivial sexual encounters unexpectedly discovers her own life-giving reserve of humility, gentleness, and compassion."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Because They Wanted To

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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*

The Devil's Treasure

Signed. First edition, Poseidon Press, 1991. Dust jacket wrapped in protective vellum (removable). Excellent vintage copy. See photos for details. 

Minnesota

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. 336 pp. National print ads & publicity. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

SIGNED FIRST EDITION Two Girls, Fat and Thin

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A Novel

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

#essays, #nonfiction #socialmatters #culture #literature #personalessays 

California

Essays

From one of the most singular presences in American fiction comes a searingly intelligent book of essays on matters literary, social, cultural, and personal. Whether she's writing about date rape or political adultery or writers from John Updike to Gillian Flynn, Mary Gaitskill reads her subjects deftly and aphoristically and moves beyond them to locate the deep currents of longing, ambition, perversity, and loneliness in the American unconscious. She shows us the transcendentalism of the Talking Heads, the melancholy of Björk, 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. And in the deceptively titled "Lost Cat," she explores how the most intimate relationships may be warped by power and race. 

Witty, tender, beautiful, and unsettling, Somebody with a Little Hammer displays the same heat-seeking, revelatory understanding for which we value Gaitskill's fiction.

Somebody with a Little Hammer

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Marlene van Niekerk

Marlene Van Niekerk

Michiel Heyns

“I was immediately mesmerized . . . as brilliant as it is haunting.” ―Toni Morrison

In 1940s apartheid South Africa, Milla de Wet discovers a child abandoned in the fields of her family farm. Ignoring the warnings of friends and family, Milla brings the girl, Agaat, into her home. But the kindness is fleeting, as Milla makes Agaat her maidservant and, later, a nanny for her son. At turns cruel and tender, this relationship between a wealthy white woman and her Black maidservant is constantly fraught and shaped by a rigid social order.

Decades later, Milla is confined to her bed with ALS, and is quickly losing her ability to communicate. Her family has fallen apart, her country is on the brink of change, and all she has left are her memories―and a reckoning with the only person who remains by her side: Agaat. In complex and devastating ways, the power shifts between the two women, mirroring the historic upheavals happening around them and revealing a shared lifetime of hopes, sacrifices, and control.

Hailed as an international masterpiece, Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat is a haunting and deeply layered saga of resilience, loyalty, betrayal, and how the passage of time cannot heal all wounds.

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Focuses on the relationship between Milla, an aging white female farmer in South Africa, and Agaat, her black maidservant, in a story set near the end of apartheid.

Agaat

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

Hanan al-Shaykh

A Retelling

Passed down over centuries from India, Persia, and across the Arab world, the mesmerizing stories of One Thousand and One Nights are related by the beautiful, young Shahrazad as she attempts to delay her execution. Retold in modern English by the acclaimed Lebanese author Hanan al-Shaykh, here are stories of the real and the supernatural, love and marriage, power and punishment, wealth and poverty, and the endless trials and uncertainties of fate. Bringing together nineteen classic tales, in these pages al-Shaykh weaves an utterly intoxicating collection, rich with humor, violence, and romance.

One Thousand and One Nights

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An evocative reimagining of 19 tales from the classic story about young queen Shahrazad's efforts to save her life from a brutal husband focuses on female characters at the heart of each tale in a woven sequence that incorporates humor and sensuality.

Selected Essays

A collection of provocative and searchingly analytical essays by the author of Bad Behavior, This is Pleasure, and Lost Cat.

Oppositions

Rick Moody

New Jersey

Celebrity gives us the opportunity to see some small part of ourselves writ large. Some public figures factor more prominently in our thoughts than others, some perhaps too much. We become fascinated, inspired, even repelled. In these daring essays, some of the most provocative writers of our time offer a private view on a public figure, and in doing so, reveal pieces of themselves. These intimate portraits show how the boundary between memoir and biography often disappears.

Browse by categories

Mary Gaitskill

Bad Behavior

Mary Gaitskill

Veronica

Mary Gaitskill

This Is Pleasure

Mary Gaitskill

The Mare

Mary Gaitskill

Lost Cat

Mary Gaitskill

Don't Cry

Mary Gaitskill

Because They Wanted To

Mary Gaitskill

The Devil's Treasure

Mary Gaitskill

Two Girls, Fat and Thin

Mary Gaitskill

Somebody with a Little Hammer

Marlene van Niekerk

Agaat

Hanan al-Shaykh

One Thousand and One Nights

Mary Gaitskill

Oppositions

Rick Moody

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