Don't Cry

Description

Full 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.

Mary Gaitskill is the author of the story collections Bad Behavior, Because They Wanted To, and Don't Cry, the novels Veronica, The Mare and Two Girls Fat and Thin, the novella This is Pleasure and the memoir Lost Cat. She has received 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.

'This new collection shows one of the great American writers continuing to evolve, proving that she can surprise as well as shock.' - Sunday Times 'Gaitskill's prose is conceptual, clean-limbed and immediate... The media still presents sex, despite progressive gestures, in such a limited, codified way that to read an author who takes it seriously, as one of the soul's deep concerns, is an experience to savour' - Vidyan Ravinthiran 'No writer understands and gratifies the voyeurism inherent in reading fiction better than Mary Gaitskill... Gaitskill writes with visceral power, with what sometimes feels like an exultantly destructive energy... They don't require suspense building toward a crisis and denouement, because they hold our attention with the promise of revealing what is ordinarily hidden from view. Hold it fiercely. Glimpses of what characters would forbid us to see are seductive, immediately involving. They insist we keep looking, just as we would at a car wreck; keep eavesdropping, as we would on a couple fighting next door; keep reading, as we would a diary left open by accident. The fierce artistry of Gaitskill's writing, its weirdly graceful introduction of the sublime into the sordid' - Kathryn Harrison 'Gaitskill is good at the throb and pop of cities and populates her stories with startling ugly-beautiful sentences.' - Observer 'Economical, intimate and unsparing, the story's control of perspective and acuity of insight give it the rich, satisfying feel of a novel.' - Press Association