Don't Cry
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- € 6,49
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- € 6,49
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'A writer of prodigious gifts' Guardian
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A grab bag of 10 stories spotlight the writhing of Gaitskill's (Veronica) listless characters within unloving landscapes. In the portrayal of a depressive 29-year-old graduate student trying to pick up her life after a shattering breakup, "College Town, 1980," set in Ann Arbor, encapsulates the collective self-abnegation that seized America's young on the cusp of the Reagan revolution. "The Agonized Face" is a rigorous critique of a feminist author who manipulates her audience "with her sullied, catastrophic life placed before us for the purpose of selling her." Mostly, though, characters give in to nostalgia rather than anger, like the medical technician in "A Dream of Men" whose bittersweet memories of her dying father mingle with her ambivalence about her sexuality; or a now-married middle-aged writer's touching encounter with a stylish former lesbian lover she had 15 years before. The title story's protagonist, a recent widow accompanying her friend to adopt a baby in an unstable Addis Ababa, is nearly submerged by her guilt at having been once unfaithful to her husband, but like others in Gaitskill's pristinely rendered yet joyless gallery, she finds visceral gratitude in unexpected moments.
