Gaitskill, Mary – The Bell Bookshop

Secretary

Emma — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books

A writer engulfed by a new obsession, an occasional sex-worker, a runaway, a teenager entering the workplace: these four tales of desire and dislocation explore the rough edges of relationships and the inner lives of women negotiating their precarious place in the world. In these coolly compelling and quietly devastating stories, Gaitskill evokes with razor-sharp precision the pleasure, pain, fear and longing that haunt modern life.

Oppositions

Emma — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

‘Mary Gaitskill is willing to think about the problematic with complexity and humanity, and without taking sides or engaging in all the fashionable moral hectoring that passes for serious thought these days.’ Eimear McBrideNuanced, daring and tender, these essays from the celebrated author of This is Pleasure and Bad Behavior, consistently fascinate and provoke. Mary Gaitskill takes on a broad range of topics from Nabokov to horse-riding with her unique ability to tease out unexpected truths and cast aside received wisdom. Written with startling grace and linguistic flair, and delving into the complicated nature of love and the responsibility we owe to the people we encounter, the work collected here inspires the reader to think beyond their first responses to life and art. Spanning thirty years of Mary Gaitskill’s writing, and covering subjects as diverse as Dancer in the Dark, the world of Charles Dickens and the Book of Revelation with her characteristic blend of sincerity and wit, Oppositions is never less than enthralling.

Don’t Cry

Emma — Thu, 11 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

‘A writer of prodigious gifts’ GuardianFull 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.

Lost Cat: A Memoir

Emma — Thu, 05 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

'Last year I lost my cat Gattino. He was very young, at seven months barely an adolescent. He is probably dead but I don't know for certain.' So begins Mary Gaitskill's stunning long essay, the closest thing she has written to a memoir, about a lost cat and a pair of adopted children. In this searing piece about loss, love, safety and fear, Gaitskill applies her razor-ship writing to her most personal subjects yet.