Mary Gaitskill

"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 and shakily recovered alcoholic, and her academic husband, Paul. Gaitskill illuminates their shifting relationships over several years, as well as Velvet's encounter with the horses at the stable down the road. Mare is the story of a girl and a horse, joined with a story of people from different races...

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. Improbably, the two women become friends. Their friendship will survive not only Alison's...

"Engaging, unusual essays written over the last two decades, on matters literary, social, cultural, and personal--from the explosive date rape debates of the '90s to the ubiquitous political adultery of the '00s, from Anton Chekhov to Celine Dion. Here is Mary Gaitskill the essayist: witty, direct, penetrating to the core of each issue, personality, or literary trope (On Updike: "It is as if [he] has entered a tiny window marked 'Rabbit,' and, by...

"In The Devil's Treasure-aptly subtitled A Book of Stories and Dreams--the iconic author Mary Gaitskill has created a chimerical hybrid of fiction, memoir, essay, criticism, and visual art that transcends categorization. This collage of four novels (one a work in progress), interspersed with and thematically linked by a single short story, then woven together with the author's commentary, is a kind of director's cut revealing the personal and societal...

Lee has a few strikes against her when she applies for a secretarial position at the law office of E. Edward Grey. In between typing, filing and coffee making, Lee and Mr. Grey embark on a personal relationship together, crossing the line.

Celebrities fascinate, inspire, and repel us. Mary Gaitskill, Rick Moody, and Jill Nelson read from and discuss a daring new book of private views on public figures: Aretha Franklin, Linda Lovelace, Harriet Tubman, M.F.K. Fisher and more come to life in these intimate portraits by contemporary writers. In conversation with editor Amy Scholder.

Collects forty short stories published between 1915 and 2015, from writers that include Ernest Hemingway, John Updike, and Alice Munro that exemplify their era and stand the test of time --