This is a reissue of National Book Award finalist Mary Gaitskill’s debut collection, Bad Behavior—powerful stories about dislocation, longing, and desire, which depict a disenchanted and rebellious urban-fringe generation as it searches for human connection.
Now a classic, Bad Behavior made critical waves when it was first published, heralding Gaitskill’s arrival on the literary scene and her establishment as a sharp, erotically charged, and audaciously funny writer of contemporary literature.
Stories included here are “Daisy’s Valentine,” “A Romantic Weekend,” “Something Nice,” “An Affair, Edited,” “Connection,” “Trying to Be,” “Secretary,” “Other Factors,” and “Heaven.”
“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, New York Times bestselling author
Mary Gaitskill returns with a luminous new collection of stories—her first in more than ten years.
In “College Town 1980,” young people adrift in Ann Arbor, Michigan, debate the meaning of personal strength at the start of the Reagan era; in the urban fairy tale “Mirror Ball,” a young man steals a girl’s soul during a one-night stand; and in “The Little Boy,” a woman haunted by the death of her 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 author of Veronica, a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction, comes 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 an eleven-year-old from Brooklyn who is granted a summer vacation in the country, courtesy of the nonprofit Fresh Air Fund. 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. Here we see 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 story of people from different races and socioeconomic backgrounds trying to meet one another honestly. It is a novel that is raw, striking, and completely original.
“The class and ethnic differences are inevitable, but the real revelation is Velvet’s introduction to horses.”—Library Journal
The extraordinary new novel from the acclaimed author of Bad Behavior and Two Girls, Fat and Thin, Veronica is about flesh and spirit, vanity, mortality, and mortal affection. Set mostly in Paris and Manhattan in the desperately glittering 1980s, it has the timeless depth and moral power of a fairy tale.
As a teenager on the streets of San Francisco, Alison is discovered by a photographer and swept into the world of fashion-modeling in Paris and Rome. When her career crashes and a love affair ends disastrously, she moves to New York City to build a new life. There she meets Veronica-an older wisecracking eccentric with her own ideas about style, a proofreader who comes to work with a personal "office kit" and a plaque that reads "Still Anal After All These Years." Improbably, the two women become friends. Their friendship will survive not only Alison's reentry into the seductive nocturnal realm of fashion, but also Veronica's terrible descent into the then-uncharted realm of AIDS. The memory of their friendship will continue to haunt Alison years later, when she, too, is aging and ill and is questioning the meaning of what she experienced and who she became during that time.
Masterfully layering time and space, thought and sensation, Mary Gaitskill dazzles the reader with psychological insight and a mystical sense of the soul's hurtling passage through the world. A novel unlike any other, Veronica is a tour de force about the fragility and mystery of human relationships, the failure of love, and love's abiding power. It shines on every page with depth of feeling and formal beauty.
