Good Boys and Dead Girls
And Other Essays
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A collection of dazzling and thought-provoking essays from lauded author Mary Gordon
Much acclaimed for her novels, Mary Gordon is also a brilliant and wide-ranging essayist. Gathering together twenty-eight of her forays into nonfiction, Good Boys and Dead Girls provides a richly autobiographical context for the themes that mark her fiction, such as Irish-American life, Catholicism, embattled families, and the redeeming power of art. Many of the pieces offer insights into artists and other writers: There are admiring accounts of Edith Wharton, Stevie Smith, and Ford Madox Ford, and a piquant critique of the depiction of women by certain celebrated male novelists. Whatever the topic at hand, Gordon proves lively and illuminating company.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 28 captivating, provocative, iconoclastic essays and reviews (all but the title piece previously published), novelist Gordon ( Final Payments ) describes her pregnancy, visits Marilyn Monroe's grave and gives a feminist reading of American literature from Faulkner to Updike. Growing up Catholic--her mother Irish-Italian, her father a right-wing Jewish intellectual who for a while posed as a Presbyterian--Gordon found salvation in art. She analyzes Irish-American puritanism as ``a desire to hide for self-protection.'' Her cultural criticism ranges widely, from East German novelist Christa Wolf to Mary Cassatt, Edith Wharton, Stevie Smith and Ford Madox Ford, whom she admires greatly. Two sensitive pieces probe the moral and psychological complexities of abortion. With her uncanny powers of observation, Gordon's combative, generous, witty essays embody a clear-eyed vision of what counts in literature and in life.
