Don't Cry (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Mary Gaitskill

Paperback, 2010

Status

Checked out

Genres

General Fiction

All Topics

Fiction

Publication

Vintage (2010), 240 pages

Description

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.

User reviews

LibraryThing member JimElkins

She could be really good. These are at their best bare, like minimalism with periodic painful injections of something squalid. But in this collection, at least, the naked writing also loses its grip: it's too uninflected, too liquid, never clotted, never really infected with the weight and sweat

and weirdness of the characters.

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LibraryThing member lawral

I didn't enjoy this book in the beginning. Then I got to the fourth story, "The Agonized Face." Gaitskill writes about a former prostitute's indifferent relationship to sensationalized sex in contrast to a stripper she had once interviewed who showed the "dark side" of sex or sexiness for pay.

Without that darkness, the former prostitute's stories were offensive and crass. This is how I felt about Gaitskill's own stories. There was gratuitous sex in every story (and I'm not a prude, I promise), and they way it was talked about was just blah. No mystery, just what the former prostitute's stories were lacking.

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LibraryThing member theageofsilt

I found these sordid stories an effort to read. I didn't relate to them in any way.

LibraryThing member laurustina

I picked this one up on the strength of one review, having never read Gaitskill before. Of the ten stories, only two (Mirror Ball and Don't Cry) really sang for me. The others either fell flat or seemed congested with more subtext than actual text. To be fair, it may have been my state of mind at

the time I read them, but I was overall underwhelmed.

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LibraryThing member chaoticbooklover

I couldn’t even remember why I bought this book once I started reading it. The stories were horrible and very hard to read. Though I only made it through one and a half stories I felt as though my IQ points were dropping like flies. I couldn’t see any rhyme or reason for any of the stories that

I read and there seemed to be only one main theme to each one and that was sex, and not the kind of sex that I really wanted to read about EVER.

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LibraryThing member Rdra1962

I grabbed this book because everyone who reviews short stories seems to hold Gaitskill as the best of the genre. Although she can really write, I did not enjoy the reading. Miserable characters in unappealing situations, making bad choices. No one is ever happy, including the reader. I have read

some very disturbing stories this summer (Oprah's latest selection!) but this collection is entirely forgettable.

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LibraryThing member boredgames

Near-perfect incisions into the human soul, desire, the ego and the id, from the best American writer working today.

LibraryThing member paroof

Each of the short stories in this collection went on a bit longer than I felt it should. However, I'm not really sure if that's a criticism. Gaitskill's writing is raw and sharp. Each time I started a new story, I thought to myself - I could just stop here and not finish the book. But with each new

story, each slow beginning, I found the earth giving way beneath my feet until I tumbled all the way in, unable to stop reading until the story eventually circled back on itself coming to an end.

I don't know who I would recommend this book to, even I didn't want to finish it. I HAD to finish it.

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