Book Description
Powerful stories of dislocation, longing and desire which depict a disenchanted and rebellious urban fringe generation that is groping for human connection. (Or, more simply put, the angst of people-who-wear-black.) ... Read more

Customer Reviews (30)

Exposing external and internal wounds of happiness and normality
In her first book, North-American writer Mary Gaitskill deals with what most people would call `strange persons'. Most of the characters in "Bad Behavior" do not fit what society calls normal -- nevertheless, they lead a so-called average life. They sleep, eat, love, hate, watch tv, work, and in between they feed the emotional detour. The best ability of this skillful writer is to avoid making them look like freaks.

In "Secretary" (the only Gaitskill adapted to the cinema so far), for instance, the title character is a young woman who has emotional issues, and meets a new boss who likes spanking her -- and she starts enjoying that. It is match made in heaven. What could be a freakshow, here is a sort of love story with a strong emotional core. The relationship in the work environment -- sexual harassment? -- is a slap in the face of the post-feminism. The writer is able o convince that those people need that kind of relationship, that they are happy with that.

In another duo of stories, Gaitskill exploits two sides of the relationship between prostitutes and clients. More than dealing with the facts, the writer is concerned with what emotional ties these people can create. "Something Nice" is a story about a fifty-something married man who falls for a professional lady. All we learn about her is through his eyes and ears. We aren't able to see her without him. On the other hand, in "Trying to Be" we meet another girl -- who could work at the same place of the previous one -- and her struggle to make ends meet taking another job as a prostitute besides her daytime job. In this story, the situation is inverted. We spend time with her, rarely known about her clients. Both stories reach their peak questioning what people wanting from these kind of relationship.

In the nine stories that are in "Bad Behavior", Gaitskill asks what we consider normal. In the end she proves that it is a relative concept. Apparently normality is someone trying to be happy -- despite his/her preferences. Or better, happiness is the consequences of being able to handle what other people would call abnormality.

Your Neighbor's Secret Life?

A collection of short stories about people whose idiosyncraciesdo not conform to society's view of "acceptable behavior," but who live essentially normal lives and who are for the most part indistinguishable from the man or women next door. As one might expect in a collection of short stories, not each story is of equal merit, but I found only one (Daisy's Valentine) which I would rate subpar. In my subjective view, the other eight ranged from excellent (Trying To Be, Secretary) to good (Something Nice, Other Factors, Heaven,) to above average (Connection, A Roamtic Weekend, An Affair Ended). Secretary was made into the movie of the same name and Heaven seemed more of an outline for a novel than a short story.

Inappropriate Social Interaction
In a highly graphic and incredibly well written book of short stories, Gaitskill creates a picture of sociopathy.In this collection of 9 short stories, Gaitskill runs the gamut of human bad behaviors.From College Girls and Prospective Writers practicing prostitution, to lesbianism, to homosexuality, to adultery, to just plain inappropriate social conduct, Gaitskill gives us an up close and personal look at the seemlier side of human interaction.

With a particularly well constructed style, each story uses incredible sentence structure, well placed profanity and illustrative descriptions of people doing the things that no one admits to doing.Yes, the "bad behavior" in society is really rampant within American society.

Each story deals with a different type of aberrant activity.The book culminates with a brilliantly written story, "Heaven" that describes the disintegration of an entire family.First one child then the next and finally the death of one is only followed by suffering and pain for all involved.Everyone gets divorced except the parents.Yet the parents see their children as failures, and thus themselves as failures as well.

While the book is not for the faint of heart, it is superb.For a look inside American society that is mostly hidden, this book brings it to the surface.It is strongly recommended for all readers who wish to see behind the curtain of façade, into the real life activities of so many men and women in America today.

Monotonous
This book was descently written, but the the subject and style of all 9 stories didn't change enough to keep me entertained. I like many people saw and liked the movie secretary, but comparing that movie to the story it is based off of would be a mistake.

Well-written, interesting, a little bit one-note
Sounds like I'm one of the few who knew absolutely nothing about Mary Gaitskill before purchasing "Bad Behavior." In fact, I'd seen (and really enjoyed - great film!) the movie "Secretary" and had no idea it was inspired by a short story in this collection.

My first exposure to Mary Gaitskill was the short story (from this collection, but I'd read it first in another) "A Romantic Weekend" - something of a long vignette about a would-be S&M romance between an egotistical married lawyer and a fawning, neurotic wannabe submissive. Unlike a lot of contemporary short fiction - with its focus on immediate scene, action and dialogue - "A Romantic Weekend" took the time to map out each of its central characters interior lives in a lively and descriptive way that encouraged me to read more. So, I stumbled upon a used copy of "Bad Behavior" and figured "what the hell?"

I give Gaitskill credit for needling at some tender nerves - stories about drug addiction, emotional abuse, sexual neurosis, prostitution and sado-masochism abound in this collection. Maybe my favorite story in the book is "Connection," about a woman (Sarah) who returns to New York after five years. Told almost entirely through backstory, "Connection" recounts Sarah's competitive relationship with Leisha - a dangerous game of sexual and drug abuse one-upsmanship that crumbled their relationship. Gaitskill is utterly unsympathetic in every way and she has a knack for biting dialogue and markers that bring her (for the most part, repellent) characters to life.

The problem with this collection is that there is nobody to sympathize with. The quintessential Gaitskill character is female, a prostitute or a slut, a drug user and either a hopelessly neurotic or ridiculously pretentious freak. Hey, they're vivid characters, but there's nobody here I'd like to have a beer with. About three stories in I started to feel like I was being re-introduced to the same character over and over again, and the persistently negative tone of Gaitskill's stories don't exactly make this a fun read. I suspect Gaitskill is better read as one entre in an anthology of stories by multiple authors. There's only so much of this stuff a guy can take in one sitting!

Overall though, I give "Bad Behavior" points for some highly inventive descriptions and prose, and for Gaitskill's clear and compelling (at least @ first) voice. If Joyce Carol Oates wrote for a more urban, Gen-X audience, it'd come out sounding a lot like this. Worth a look, but I'd recommend checking out a story or two first before deciding whether you're up for an entire book of Gaitskill's bad boys and the women who deserve them. The Tin House fiction reader features her story "A Bestial Noise" - that'd be a good place to start.

I'd like to add: I KNOW this review won't get many "helpful" votes. Most people who visit an item at Amazon (myself included) check out books they're already familiar with or like, so anything short of gushing praise is bound to come across as unhelpful to the true believers around here. But it's the truth. Mary Gaitskill is a talented writer who seems to write the same story over and over again. It's a good story. But it does get old over the course of an anthology. Like I said, she's probably better read as one entre in an anthology, where the overwhelming negativity and in my opinion, her almost juvenile need to shock can be taken in small doses. Over the course of 200 pages I started to lose interest in yet another over-sexed neurotic - take it for what it's worth. ... Read more

Amazon.com
Reading a Mary Gaitskill short story is like getting into a no-holds-barred fight: mean, raw, and dangerous. She's fond of portraying characters who seem strangely comfortable living in emotional extremity. She never takes the safe route through a story; in fact, she'll choose the low road every time. The title story places a runaway girl in care of abandoned children. Where many writers would seek out some faint ray of redemption or hope, Gaitskill concentrates on the grime in the cracks of the linoleum. In "The Girl on the Plane," a bitter man confesses his participation in a brutal act to a stranger, but the confession brings no solace. These stories practically shake with tension. In the final long story of this collection, "The Wrong Thing," Gaitskill picks up the tale after the breaking point, as she gracefully illuminates the life of a woman piecing together the fragments of her sexual and emotional history. Because They Wanted not only fulfills the promise of her previous short-story collection Bad Behavior and the novel Two Girls, Fat and Thin, it takes us to a higher place. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (47)

Kraft-Ebbing meets Miss Lonelyhearts
I'd still recommend starting with "Bad Behavior" if you haven't read any Gaitskill before. She gets more ambitious and profound as she gets older and the reading is not as easy. In this short story collection the character descriptions are clever but sometimes bewildering, such as"a thin excitable woman who appeared to be keeping a strictinner watch over an invisible set of perfectly balanced inner objects, lest any of them fall over or even fractionallyshift position."
The first nine stories are about screenwriters, philosophers, hookers, musicians, dentists, social workers, vagrants etc in California, Seattle, Vancouver, Iowa and Greenwich Village.Plots are (very roughly) as follows:
Lesbian tells all about homophobic father.
Runaway babysitter gets stiffed.
Psychopharmacologist neglects sick sister for bisexual social worker.
Rape fantasy spoils relationship.
Girl friend doesn't send a get well card.
Rapist confesses (perhaps to victim).
Helpful dentist is too shy.
Screenwriter tells all about actress ex.
The last four stories are interrelated, about a group of San Franciscans whose love lives areexemplified by " Ellie called, very excited, to tell me about her cutting experience with the dominatrix" which is vintage Gaitskill stuff. Enjoy.

A strange jangling beauty
Some readers may argue that Gaitskill's characters merely resist growing up, and it's certainly true that their lives are much more in an uproar, much more in flux than the lives of their peers who are married with children. And yet to dismiss them as piquant malcontents seems unfair--they are, after all, after a more profound and dangerous intimacy than the intimacy that might be found in more stable relationships. Gaitskill has also managed to achieve, in this third book, a moving away from the voyeuristic; this has made the work inevitably quieter, and has even made some of the characters seem almost "normal".

In Tiny, Smiling Daddy, the opening story in Because They Wanted To, a sexually prodigal daughter discharges "her strange jangling beauty" into her father's house, "changing the molecules of its air". In another story (Processing), a waitress, "vibrant with purpose" pours water for her dinner guests "with a harried rattle of ice". At a party in Palo Alto, light "runs and flirts on silverware". All of these glimpses into Gaitskill's latest stories illustrate how charged her language can be, and how much it is animated (in spite of its dark themes) by both boldness and joie de vivre.

In other Gaitskill stories, many of the characters act as impish raconteurs of narratives that reveal their own pain or shame. Their audience is made up of a sort of floating opera of fast friends, scoffers, and therapists manque. Privacy is sacrificed to get at "the truth" about both intimacy and the potential that life has for the playful (and in particular for the sexually playful) to be extended into adulthood. But sex, in Gaitskill's world, is mischievous, cerebral, brutal, or even described with an almost dainty candour, the one thing it is not is sexy.

There are also exquisite moments of non-sexual tenderness. In one of the final stories, a poet who teaches at Berkeley says of one of her students: "He didn't write very well, but he was a passionate student and so was a favourite of mine. He took me in with a wistful, subtle movement of his eyes. I felt him accept my fondness and shyly give it back. Without knowing it, he comforted me." But then Gaitskill's theme is (and always has been) intimacy: how to find it, create it, retrieve it, bestow it. And also--and this is where the tragedy in much of her work locates itself--how it's only longed for, squandered, or lost.

Stunning Stories!
Mary Gaitskill's second story collection, "Because They Wanted To," seemed to me just as fresh as her first, with a quieter, deeper reflection on the human condition and dazzling gems of insight imbedded in its rich foundation. Each of the twelve stories (eight stories and four connected stories within a novella) is a tale of unrequited love in varying forms and degrees. In "Tiny, Smiling Daddy," a father discovers his lesbian daughter has published an article about their relationship; in "Because They Wanted To," a destitute runaway agrees to baby sit a stranger's three children for an afternoon while the woman hunts for a job, and reflects on the past that drove her to Canada; and in "The Girl on the Plane," a man is seated next to a woman that reminds him of a woman he once gang-raped and when confronted with the brutality of the act, desperately searches for ways in which he could excuse or explain his behavior. I most admire Gaitskill's incredible ability to pin down the nuanced behaviors and thoughts that make us all paradoxically universal and unique.

Brilliant!!!
BECAUSE THEY WANTED TO is an absolute masterpiece of literature! Gaitskill's ability to describe the most complex and dark human emotions is stunning; each story is well-written down to the smallest detail, and you are able to relate to the pain of the characters--even if you have never experienced the things that they are going through yourself.

"The Wrong Thing," a four-part story of one woman's inability to find a meaningful romantic relationship, was my favorite one in the book. The main character, Susan, is presented in a way that allows readers to feel her pain and to sympathize with her as she goes through various struggles. This story was the last one in the collection, and its ending was also a great ending for the entire book.

The other stories are also good: from a woman who is obsessed with her dentist, to a 16-year-old runaway who is just trying to find ways to support herself, to a woman who realizes that she just might love a much younger man...these stories all touch the soul. This collection is in some ways lighter than Gaitskill's gritty BAD BEHAVIOR, but it is still full of complexity and people who display extreme examples of human emotion.

Highly recommended!!!

Because it has a pretty cover.
I basically agree with everyone's criticism. Gaitskill harps on a point till you want to say, "Shut up already! No one CARES." Which I'm sure is counterproductive to her artistic crusade. I typically don't mind authors breaking from the beginning-middle-end formula if they do it well, or at least intend to do it well. If they fail miserably, then they deserve to be panned. Gaitskill fails miserably. It's like she didn't even care for her stories by the time she got to the end of them. She could have written one novella with all these crappy stories and still come out behind, but should could have saved a little face that way. ... Read more

Book Description
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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (53)

Beauty and the Beast in Man
Gaitskill's central theme is, I think, the relationship between love and lust. Is being beautiful a fatal gift? The main relationship she describes is between Alison, the former model, and Veronica the unlikable AIDS infected proofreading temp, but there are multiple other dyads and triads, all illustrating types of love.
This represents an advance in Gaitskill's work in many ways. It is more ambitious and profound, but also, I am afraid, a little less readable than her early work. If you're new to Gaitskill I would recommend starting with her earlier work, such as "Bad Behavior" which is written in a more straightforward style (and also contains more humor). In this one she uses a fancy-shmancy system of flashbacks, so that sometimes you don't know whether what you're reading is about the framing day in California, or reminiscences of Alison's childhood in New Jersey, or experiences in New York, or San Francisco or Paris.

Why do novels turn her into a poet?
This novel is a near-masterpiece, and Mary Gaitskill displays her obvious brilliance throughout. She shows that she's a poet as well as a fiction writer. I loved Alison's story, but the last one-fourth of this book isn't in turn with the rest. It seemed as though the author had grown tired of the tale and just wanted to get it down on paper. I didn't see the beautiful imagery and narrative intertwining that had previously held me transfixed. At a certain point, the story focuses too much on Veronica, a character who never quite seems clear enough to me. I guess what I'm trying to say here is that the first part of this book is simply brilliant, but then it all falls apart. I also want to say that I don't really care. I'm glad I read this book. The author is one of the most talented writers of our time and I will read anything she writes, always.

Amazing, breathtaking prose
Not an easy book to describe, recount, or read. The story arch begins and ends on the same day. An older woman with a debilitating disease and injuries that will never heal is on her way to and from her job as a cleaning lady for herformer agent from her high flying modeling days. Flashing back and forth in time with memories of her family, running away from home in the hippie days, high fashion modeling, and her friend Veronica, who serves as a touchstone. With all her flights of fancy, Veronica is the realist to the narrator's world of mirrors and quick sand. The drugs may change, but the distorted perceptions remain the same, and the prose that expresses the desperate search for happiness is unbelievably gripping.

I Don't Get the Hype!
I'm an intelligent person and read 3-5 books a week of all genres, but especially enjoy Philip Roth, Richard Russo and my favorite in the arena of contemporary fiction, Ian McEwan.I also read 1 biography or non-fiction a week, so I have been exposed to many writers and many syles.I'm not finished with "Veronica," and I'm not sure that I will finish it.So far, I truly dislike this book.It is so disjointed, has not one character that I could relate to or even care about.I guess I just don't get it, which really surprises me.The timelines are incorrect and, as another reviewer mentioned, inaccurate.There is no continuity or depth of character.This is not the book for me.

I like it more as I look back on it
I like it more as I look back on it, but VERONICA is still a much more sodden and uneven book than Gaitskill's collection of stories, BECAUSE THEY WANTED TO, although there's still plenty of evidence of her uncanny gift for seizing moments and gestures in all their primal intensity. In one of the stories in BECAUSE THEY WANTED TO a waitress, "vibrant with purpose" pours water for her dinner guests "with a harried rattle of ice" and at a party in Palo Alto, light "runs and flirts on silverware". These electric glimpses into Gaitskill's stories illustrate how charged her language can be, and how much it is animated (in spite of its dark themes) by both boldness and joie de vivre.

There's great momentum in Veronica's language too, even if it is a less thrilling book. And Gaitskill is so emotionally honest that she knows how to make so many of her scenes, so many of her moments, in whatever form she's writing in, so utterly memorable.

I particularly loved the scene that takes place in the first two pages of the book; everything about it is enchanted, frightening, and (in terms of Gaitskill's use of language, tempo, tenderness, mockery, and fear) everything also has a stunning intensity.



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Customer Reviews (25)

Sharply and brilliantly insightful.
Reading Mary Gaitskill is like reading Kathryn Harrison's prolix sister.

This book tells the tale of two damaged women who coincidentally meet and after doing so reexamine their pasts, which include sexual trauma and unstable family situations.

Though Gaitskill's prose occasionally reads like a psychology textbook, she thrills the reader with sparkling, profound insight into the cruel hothouse of sexuality and confusion her characters grow up in.One girl, the overweight one, is friendless and lonely; the other, the thin one, is pretty, popular, and indulges in a mean streak, though certain early encounters in her life have mixed up the wiring in her brain and made her a masochist.

I didn't think the book was quite as interesting when dealing with the characters as adults (in particular the overweight woman, Dorothy), and the ending left a little something to be desired, but Gaitskill is unrivaled in her ability to put you right into the minds of her wounded characters, and lay bare the world they live in (internally and externally).

Despite getting a little soft in the end, I thought this was a brilliant book at showing the trace-line from what happens to us as children and how our confused, uncomprehending, inchoate, not-yet-mature-enough-to-understand thoughts and reasoning colors who we are and what we do for the rest of our lives.

Our fragile humanity

I was a little wary about the title but this was not at all about weight gain and/or loss; weight was incidental. In this fiercely intelligent novel, Dorothy and Justine are both desperately lonely women, both victims of abuse, and yet are different in other ways. Their parents often failed them, their childhood was often full of shame and self-sabotage, but Gaitskill writes this with complexity, always aware that a victim can also be a victimizer. Gaitskill is never sentimental. Underneath her narrative, underneath the pain and the sex scenes (which are never fully loving) and the disappointments and loneliness, is a raging anger at the inability of human beings to connect - on race, on class, but mostly on gender. I sensed that Anna Granite, the intellectual whose shadow dominates this narrative, and who is the reason Dorothy and Justine first meet, is Gaitskill's platform for displaying her keen intellect; and sometimes there is a hint of didactism. But this is a minor quibble. The last section moved me very much and proved that although Gaitskill abhors sentimentality, she can certainly do sentiment well. `Humanity' is a word often found in this book. Our sexuality is connected to our humanity. Our ability to treat other human beings like human beings is what makes us human. In the end, Gaitskill's brilliant, wonderfully feminist novel was, for me, about how easily we strip each other of our humanity.

Imaginative, fascinating book
The book begins with the narrator noticing a message on a laundromat bulletin board, instantly drawing my interest.My interest never flags, with the author's symbolic visual and intellectualized descriptions of her environment and things that happen to her.The books feels like I was watching a movie in 3D.

The two main characters are both young women. Dorothy Never is overweight and masochistic while Justine Shade is a thin, masochistic and sadistic free lance journalist.Dorothy meets her through the bulletin board ad she sees on the "Definitist" philosophy.This author-created philosophy permits the main character (Dorothy) to work out neuroses formed by childhood traumas such as peer teasing and especially incest, and move forward in her life.

I found the names of characters, places and philosophy to be both creative and entertaining, as were the Hopper-esque visuals of New York City which added magical touches to the novel, making it all the more seductive.The references to the weight of the two women -- one fat, the other thin -- symbolized in an interesting way the always present theme of emotional deprivation.

Many things happen in this book that detail the intellectual and mostly emotional journal of two shattered personalities.

Gaitskill has Grown...
Maybe it's because I read Veronica before reading Two Girls, but I was somewhat disappointed.I'm always interested to see the evolution of an author I enjoy, but I could feel myself backpeddling.

As always with Gaitskill's writing, she paints a beautiful portrait of lonliness and isolation without necessarily writing a "sad" book.Her major characters are clearly cut, interesting and incredibly multi-faceted, and her minor characters are sketches that weave in and out of the background without feeling like characitures--a feat well accomplished.You feel for both Justine and Dorothy, but maybe not as much as you wish you could.Because while they are both interesting and sympathetic, they are simultaneously repulsive and unlikable.

The needs are there and the language is moving but the background of the Ayn Rand character and her followers is somewhat laborious.While Anna Granite served to bring the two girls together, she was uninteresting and the segments involving her were draggy.Perhaps my reaction to this part of the story has something to do with the fact that, like Justine, I never "got" the whole Ayn Rand thing.Her books and so-called "philosophy" were uninspired and uninspiring to me.

All in all, an enjoyable read, but it doesn't hold much of a candle to Gaitskill's later works.If you thought this book was decent or better, I'd suggest picking up some later Gaitskill.It's worth the time and investment.

Fat or Thin, its still Beautiful
Just like her short story collection, Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill's novel, Two Girls Fat and Thin, left me speechless.The story seemed simple enough: the thin girl is interviewing the fat girl about her time working for the author/cult leader, Anna Granite.They are both wary of each other, the interviewer thinks the interviewee is crazy and the interviewee feels that her entire belief system is under attack by the interviewer.But in the end a strange friendship/bond/understanding will form between the two of them.

But its so much more than that.

While I completely appreciate all the goofy reincarnation of Ayn Rand (can I assume that she's the object of ridicule throughout the book!?), I can't help but be drawn into the actual lives of Dorothy and Justine.Dorothy's affiliation with a literary cult leader seems almost unnecessary, though executed perfectly.However its the `compare and contrast' of these two women's lives that really makes the story - how they are terribly different physically and emotionally, BUT how they are also very similar.They both share strange and horrible relationships with their parents, were both molested as young children and have finally achieved a sense of independence just before their meeting.You get complete character dissections of each of them: what they want, what they think they want and what they already had.Where both women have unresolved unresolved conflicts from their past, its too late to doing anything about them.It seems that their acquaintanceship, while mistrustful at first is their stepping stone to personal redemption.

Mary Gaitskill is yet again justly perverse and sexual, especially through Justine and her trysts through childhood and her current ill-suited lover and sadist, Bryan. Dorothy recounts her painful years of being an overweight girl growing up and only finding acceptance within Anna Granite's circle.

Two Girls, Fat and Thin is an amazing book - with very wise and witty language.There are many moments when Gaitskill sums up in a few words everything you need to know about what creates strong relationships between strangers.These are not stereotypical characters, these are not trite and uncomplicated scenes.For a book that will give you a lot to think about and won't require a dictionary to get through, you can't go wrong.
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Book Description
Alison and Veronica meet amid the nocturnal glamour of 1980s New York: One is a young model stumbling away from the wreck of her career, the other an eccentric middle-aged office temp. Over the next twenty years their friendship will encompass narcissism and tenderness, exploitation and self-sacrifice, love and mortality. Moving seamlessly from present and past, casting a fierce yet compassionate eye on two eras and their fixations, the result is a work of timeless depth and moral power. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (14)

So awful I wanted to cry.
I cannot believe people feel this book's strength is in the writing. That must speak loads about the plot because this is some of the very worst writing I have ever seen in a book that is supposedly above preschool level.I don't mean grammar, I mean style. As someone else already said, it was like reading someone's laundry list. I have read high school essays with more style and feeling. It was seriously god awful. I'm not even going to get into the plot of it, because I don't want to sit here all night writing my review of this drivel. I guess anyone can get published nowadays.

Also, Gaitskill clearly copied her writing style from one of my all time favorite books when I was about three, which is "I am a Puppy". Here's a passage from that book to illustrate: "I am a puppy. My name is Bruno. I am a Beagle. I like to play outside. Sometimes I meet bigger dogs, but they turn out to be friendly. I like to play in the mud, but when I get dirty I have to take a bath. I hate baths." The writing styles are so alike that it could almost be the same book.

Not Worth The Time
Like another reviewer, I too read this for a book club and all of us agreed this book was flawed and a chore to get through.The characters never jumped off the page, least of all the namesake of the book.The author jumped around so much I found myself not caring what decade I was in.The only reason I finished this book at all was out of loyalty to the book club, and after we discussed it we all threw our copies away.

Tedious and Overwritten
I found this book exhausting. First, Gatskill jumps around in time incessantly. She'll place the character in three different places in time in the space of a paragraph. No warning, no transitions. It's difficult to know where you are at any one point. More importantly, though, is that Gatskill completely assaults the reader with in-depth analysis and details. She overuses words (must have used the word "flesh" at least 20 times in the first half of the book alone), and wastes her gift for description. She gives you so much that you become hardened to its power. It no longer provides insight into the story, it just comes off as self-indulgent and tedious. It's like eating an entire cake. One or two bites could be sublime and satisfying. Consuming the whole thing just makes you sick. I do not recommend this book.

A New Twist on the Theme of Resurrection
Mary Gaitskill proves to be masterful in her placement of words and the creation of images. Often while reading the book, I would have to pause to take in the beauty of the image she was presenting or to suck in my breath at the sadness of what I was reading.

She gives us a new twist on the theme of resurrection where instead of god-like or angelic intervention, two lost souls save each other and learn the cleansing effects of love. Mary Gaitskills shows us the beauty in breakdown and ugliness. The last sentence sums up the secret to a "good" life.

Veronica
This book was chosen for a book club read and I was so excited to begin it.I finished this book and felt compelled to give my opinion on it as it was chosen for the opinions of others, and maybe someone else will not make the mistake because of this opinion. Firstly, I don't know why this book was called "Veronica", because other than a few mentions of her name, you don't meet the character until more than half way through the book.And I did not take anything of significance from her character when she did appear.I could not find anything of significance in this book at all from any character.I still am wondering why the author felt the need to write this book, or better yet the publisher felt the need to publish it.A good story makes us want to be a character in that story, it transports us to that time and place and we are saddened when we have to leave.This book does not tell a story, it is words put together made to resemble a story, but comes far short of the goal. The characters are not characters that you love, but you can't hate them, you just can't feel anything for them. I wish I could at least say this book was well written, but I can't even compliment the writing style because it jumps from time period to time period in a single paragraph, you never know where you are.
For anyone who still desires to read this book, by all means do, but check it out from your local library before wasting good money on a bad book ... Read more

Book Description

In her introduction to The Man Back There, Mary Gaitskill writes simply, "I chose these stories because they made me feel. . . ." The reader of David Crouse's collection is bound to agree, but the reasons are not easily explained. Crouse crawls inside the heads of a dozen male protagonists and tells us how they think. They are not always likeable. They are often losers-their thoughts hurry ahead or dawdle behind, disconnected from what little action occurs around them.

And yet, somehow, we wince for the dog-catcher who crashes his ex-wife's Thanksgiving dinner in "The Castle on the Hill." We sympathize with the latch-key kid who pillages toys in a dead boy's closet in "Time Capsule." And in "The Long Run," we find it hard to condemn a ninety-two-year-old senator trying to salvage his career after his ex-wife publishes a scandalous tell-all book about his life.

In this deceptively quiet collection, the truth is something that simmers up through what is not said. A hero is a man who saves himself from himself, who placates his temper with self-awareness and, most importantly, self-forgiveness. The Man Back There is a feat of empathy and razor sharp vision.

David Crouse is the author of Copy Cats, which received the 2005 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. He lives in Fairbanks, where he teaches at the University of Alaska.

Book Description
Word count: 2919. ... Read more

Book Description
Index Magazine Volume 7 #5 Cover: Udo Kier photographed by Richard Kern. Plus: Kid America, architect Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk interviewed by Peter Halley, Antony of Antony and the Johnsons interviewed by Lou Reed, fiction section with stories by Mary Gaitskill, Eileen Myles, and Heather Lewis. ... Read more

Book Description
"Desire, for hire, would tire a shire," James Joyce wrote in Finnegans Wake, though Conjunctions: 48 proposes the shire'd be tired even if the desire weren't hired. Desire informs everything we do, from the smallest gestures to the grandest concerns. When it establishes residence in the heart, it becomes a tireless engine, motivating good, and by turns evil. Yearning can be sexual or religious, charitable or greedy, thoughtful or callous, profound as belief or superficial as a whim. Is there any more formidable, defining emotion? Mary Gaitskill, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Mary Caponegro, Robert Kelly, Carole Maso, Brian Evenson, Robert Olen Butler, Joyce Carol Oates, Will Self, David Shields, Frederic Tuten and Rikki Ducornet, mong others, explore its tricky terrain in never-before-published essays, memoirs, poetry and fiction. Faces of Desire is an exuberant look--now grim, now hilarious, now poignant--into one of the most mysterious and crucial forces of life. ... Read more

Product Description
Glimmer Train presents literary short stories by award-winning and upcoming writers. Here are some excerpts:

Cheri Johnson
Guralnick
Whenever one of those little wolves came in on the same pitch as another, the first wolf lifted or dropped its voice to make it sound as if the pack were growing all the time.

Susan Perabo
Why They Run the Way They Do
Sweetie,Tommy says miserably. And right then it becomes apparent that one of us is going to start crying. I m not sure which of us, but either way it s something to be thwarted at all costs.

James Sepsey
Not When a Day Can Be This Good
You re thirty-seven. I need you to be a man. Like your father, your grandfather, your great-grandfather. All men. God, you d think it d run in the family at some point.

D.B.C. Pierre
Interview by Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais
I never quite believe writers who say they re up at seven a.m. to write a thousand words. They have a cup of tea, and then write two thousand words after lunch. I can t see that happening to me.

Antonya Nelson
Falsetto
He had never been an ordinary boy. He was so thin that people grew angry when he wouldn t eat.

Deborah Tarnoff
Crazy Ukraine Girl
All over the world people are preoccupied with building memorials to help them remember. But the smart ones are busy forgetting.

Susan Petrone
This Is How It Happened
I don t think any of them are in actual denial: they understand that I am dying, they re just getting used to the idea in incremental fashion.

Elissa Minor Rust
In My Mother s Trailer
My girlfriend s son, Charlie, is watching a boy about his age resuscitate a frog on tonight s news. To be fair, the boy is only pretending to resuscitate the frog, a re-enactment of the actual event, which happened earlier in the week.

Christiana Langenberg
Half of What I Know
The theory is the dog committed suicide. My father tells me this when I get home from school, after he says Luigi is gone, and I ask him what he means.

Mary Gaitskill
Interview by Sarah Anne Johnson
I was also going through physical changes, what they euphemistically call thechange of life.It was like the ground was shifting under my feet, so it was hard for me to write from a solid place.

Janice Soderling
Rented Rooms
There is a succession of rooms, all of them temporary, as life is temporary. Some of them, many of them, are filled with laughter, with friendship, with affection, with hope.

Andrew Roe
Please Don t Tell Me ThatWe go on one of those streets that seems to repeat itself every few blocks: gas stations, Home Depots, Taco Bells, Burger Kings. After that some apartments or a storage place or a used-car lot, and then the same scene all over again.

Benjamin Percy
The Caves in Oregon
The cave a lava tube runs beneath their house, their neighborhood, and beyond, a vast tunnel that once carried in it molten rock the color of an angry sun. ... Read more