Two Girls Fat And Thin

Justine, a beautiful, lonely, sexually addicted young woman, meets Dorothy, fat, maladjusted, and unhappy since childhood. They are superficially a study in contrasts yet share equally haunting sexual burdens carried since youth. With common secrets, they are drawn into a remarkable friendship.

Alison and Veronica meet amid the nocturnal glamour of 1980s New York: one is a former modelling sensation, stumbling away from the wreck of her career, the other an eccentric middle-aged proofreader with a meticulous eye. Over the next twenty years their friendship will encompass narcissism and tenderness, exploitation and self-sacrifice, love and mortality. Moving seamlessly between the glamorous and gritty '80s, when beauty and style gave licence to excess, and the broken world of the decade's survivors twenty years later, Gaitskill casts a fierce yet compassionate eye on the two eras and their fixations. Veronica masterfully evokes the fragility and mystery of human relationships in a world where love is rife with frightening artificiality. Evocative, raw and entirely unique, Veronica was shortlisted for the prestigious 2005 National Book Award in the USA.

National Book Award finalist Mary Gaitskill’s debut collection, Bad Behavior—powerful stories about dislocation, longing, and desire which depict a disenchanted and rebellious urban fringe generation that is searching for human connection. Now a classic, Bad Behavior made critical waves when it first published, heralding Gaitskill’s arrival on the literary scene and her establishment as one of the sharpest, erotically charged, and audaciously funny writing talents of contemporary literature. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times called it “Pinteresque,” saying, “Ms. Gaitskill writes with such authority, such radar-perfect detail, that she is able to make even the most extreme situations seem real…her reportorial candor, uncompromised by sentimentality or voyeuristic charm…underscores the strength of her debut.”

Based on Dr. Robyn Silverman's groundbreaking research at Tufts University, and filled with searingly honest young voices, Good Girls Don't Get Fat: – Decodes the ripple effects of actions that damage our girls—and provides tools to help stop them. – Shines light on the positive influence of women who embrace body types of any size—and explains how to model the right behavior. – Shows how girls, whatever their size, can own their strengths, trust their power and accomplish amazing things.

Taken in by a near-alcoholic artist and a jaded academic, a young Dominican girl in Brooklyn's Fresh Air Fund program explores the contrasts between her inner-city life and her hosts' privileged world and finds her realities powerfully shaped by her relationship with a horse.

"In this searching biography of the writer’s imagination, Mary Gaitskill excavates her own novels, revealing their origins and obsessions, the personal and societal pressures that formed them, and the life story hidden between their pages. Using the techniques of collage, The Devil's Treasure splices fiction together with commentary and personal history, and with the fairy tale that gives the book its title, about a little girl who ventures into Hell through a suburban trapdoor." -- Publisher's website.

A collection of startling and breathtaking stories about people struggling with the disparity between what they want and what they know. A New York Times Notable Book A man tells a story to a woman sitting beside him on a plane, little suspecting what it reveals about his capacity for cruelty and contempt. A callow runaway girl is stranded in a strange city with another woman’s fractiously needy children. An uncomprehending father helplessly lashes out at the daughter he both loves and resents. In these raw, startling, and incandescently lovely stories, the author of Veronica yields twelve indelible portraits of people struggling with the disparity between what they want and what they know. Because They Wanted To is further evidence that Gaitskill is one of the fiercest, funniest, and most subversively compassionate writers at work today.

Starting with Bad Behavior in the 1980s, Mary Gaitskill has been writing about gender relations with searing, even prophetic honesty. In This Is Pleasure, she considers our present moment through the lens of a particular #MeToo incident. The effervescent, well-dressed Quin, a successful book editor and fixture on the New York arts scene, has been accused of repeated unforgivable transgressions toward women in his orbit. But are they unforgivable? And who has the right to forgive him? To Quin’s friend Margot, the wrongdoing is less clear. Alternating Quin’s and Margot’s voices and perspectives, Gaitskill creates a nuanced tragicomedy, one that reveals her characters as whole persons—hurtful and hurting, infuriating and touching, and always deeply recognizable. Gaitskill has said that fiction is the only way that she could approach this subject because it is too emotionally faceted to treat in the more rational essay form. Her compliment to her characters—and to her readers—is that they are unvarnished and real. Her belief in our ability to understand them, even when we don’t always admire them, is a gesture of humanity from one of our greatest contemporary writers.