Mary Gaitskill
Author
Language
English
Description
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, who wonder what it will mean to "make a difference" in such a contrived situation. Gaitskill illuminates their shifting relationship with Velvet over several years, as well as Velvet's encounter with the horses at the stable down the road,...
Author
Publisher
Pantheon Books
Pub. Date
[2019]
Language
English
Description
"In this powerful short fiction, Mary Gaitskill--whose searing honesty about gender relations has been legendary since the appearance of Bad Behavior in the 1980s--considers our moment through the lens of a particular #metoo incident. The effervescent and well-dressed Quin, a successful book editor and fixture on the New York arts scene, has long been one of Margot's best friends. When several women in his field accuse him of inappropriate touching...
4) Veronica
Author
Publisher
Vintage Contemporaries
Pub. Date
[2006]
Language
English
Description
The friendship that began in the 1980s between Alison, a young woman struggling with her ruined career as a fashion model, and Veronica, an older eccentric proofreader, survives Alison's return to the world of fashion and Veronica's battle with AIDS.
Series
Publisher
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Pub. Date
2012.
Language
English
Description
Presents twenty of the best works of short fiction of the past year from a variety of acclaimed sources.
Tom Perrotta explains in his introduction that "all of [these stories] took me somewhere I didn't expect to go, and jolted me into that state of heightened awareness and emotional receptivity that's one of the great rewards of reading good fiction." The characters in these stories seek to discover something lacking in their life. Their stories...
Series
Publisher
Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
"'To read their stories felt to me the way I suspect other people feel hearing jazz for the first time, ' recalls Curtis Sittenfeld of her initial encounter with the Best American Short Stories series. 'They were windows into emotions I had and hadn't had, into other settings and circumstances and observations and relationships.' Sittenfeld was met by the same feeling selecting the stories for this year's edition. The result is a striking and nuanced...