<![CDATA[Don't Cry]]>

false <![CDATA[Don't Cry]]> 4267835 4 Following the extraordinary success of her novel Veronica, Mary Gaitskill returns with a luminous new collection of stories--her first in more than ten years. In “College Town l980,” young people adrift in Ann Arbor debate the meaning of personal strength at the start of the Reagan era; in the urban fairy tale “Mirrorball,” a young man steals a girl’s soul during a one-night stand; in “The Little Boy,” a woman haunted by the death of her former husband is finally able to grieve through a mysterious encounter with a needy child; and in “The Arms and Legs of the Lake,” the fallout of the Iraq war becomes disturbingly real for the disparate passengers on a train going up the Hudson--three veterans, a liberal editor, a soldier’s uncle, and honeymooners on their way to Niagara Falls. Each story delivers the powerful, original language, and the dramatic engagement of the intelligent mind with the craving body--or of the intelligent body with the craving mind--that is characteristic of Gaitskill’s fiction. As intense as Bad Behavior, her first collection of stories, Don’t Cry reflects the profound enrichment of life experience. As the stories unfold against the backdrop of American life over the last thirty years, they describe how our social conscience has evolved while basic human truths--“the crude cinder blocks of male and female down in the basement, holding up the house,” as one character puts it--remain unchanged. 4315321 24 3 2009 Don't Cry: Stories total:253|5:45|4:78|3:86|2:32|1:12| 253 871 661 85 3 8 false false Tue Mar 24 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Tue Mar 24 20:55:33 -0700 2009 Sun Mar 29 16:14:45 -0700 2009 Don't Cry was a disappointing reading experience. At first I found the book to be kind of annoying. The first story was quite unappealing, in both the characters and whatever it was that was going on. Then for the next few stories the unappealing just kept happening. None of the stories could se...more...]]> 5 4 false false Wed Apr 01 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Sat Feb 21 13:17:45 -0800 2009 Thu Jun 04 11:45:42 -0700 2009 more...]]> 5 3 false false Sat Oct 18 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Thu Oct 16 15:52:53 -0700 2008 Sat Oct 18 09:42:22 -0700 2008
Afterward: Yeah. An interesting thing happened in this one- I can't rem...more...]]> 4 1 false false Wed Apr 08 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Wed Apr 08 20:34:46 -0700 2009 Wed Apr 08 20:43:26 -0700 2009 more...]]> 3 0 false false Wed Jul 01 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Thu Jul 09 15:43:09 -0700 2009 Thu Jul 09 15:50:27 -0700 2009 more...]]> 4 0 false false Fri Nov 20 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Sun Nov 29 20:37:28 -0800 2009 Mon Nov 30 22:24:34 -0800 2009 more...]]> 4 1 false false Mon Apr 13 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Sun Apr 12 19:15:45 -0700 2009 Wed Apr 15 10:37:51 -0700 2009
I've always appreciated her ability to wake me up--in particular, her ability to defamiliarize the understandings of intimacy ...more...]]> 4 0 false false Mon Jun 01 07:39:17 -0700 2009 Mon Jun 01 08:03:55 -0700 2009 Ranging from gritty realism to fanciful allegory, the stories in Don't Cry push the boundaries of fiction in several directions. Populated by peculiar but always authentic characters with bizarre dreams and fantasies, Gaitskill's stories lack conventional plots, timelines, and mounting suspense, but...

more...]]> 2 1 false false Mon Mar 02 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Sat Jan 31 05:25:36 -0800 2009 Mon Mar 02 18:13:26 -0800 2009 0 1 false false Sun Oct 19 19:15:03 -0700 2008 Sun Oct 19 19:16:42 -0700 2008 pretty convincing....]]> 4 0 false false Tue Oct 06 00:24:03 -0700 2009 Wed Oct 14 10:43:10 -0700 2009 more...]]> 5 0 false false Fri May 01 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Thu May 07 16:40:57 -0700 2009 Thu May 07 16:41:30 -0700 2009 more...]]> 3 0 false false Thu Nov 12 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Sun Nov 08 21:41:32 -0800 2009 Thu Nov 12 21:38:20 -0800 2009 more...]]> 2 1 false false Thu Mar 12 19:09:33 -0700 2009 Thu Apr 23 12:46:31 -0700 2009 Unmitigated, Unreadable Despair

The stories in Mary Gaitskill’s Don’t Cry reflect characters who are profoundly vexed, but not in a profound way. It seems that Ms. Gaitskill has contrived both them and their situations with the simple goal of shocking her reader. The stories are...more...]]> 2 0 false false Mon Jun 01 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Wed Jul 22 20:58:35 -0700 2009 Wed Jul 22 20:59:28 -0700 2009 more...]]> 2 1 false false Mon Jun 22 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Sun Apr 19 17:56:20 -0700 2009 Mon Jun 22 14:56:46 -0700 2009 more...]]> 3 0 false false Sat Feb 21 08:50:33 -0800 2009 Sun May 03 15:40:00 -0700 2009 more...]]> 1 0 false false Sun Aug 02 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Thu Jul 30 18:51:50 -0700 2009 Sun Aug 02 08:37:50 -0700 2009 more...]]> 3 0 false false Fri Sep 18 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Mon Sep 21 11:37:28 -0700 2009 Mon Sep 21 11:41:29 -0700 2009 more...]]> 3 0 false false Sat Jun 20 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Tue May 19 21:19:23 -0700 2009 Sat Jun 20 10:50:02 -0700 2009 more...]]> http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/1?book_id=7090353 http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/3?book_id=7090353 http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/2?book_id=7090353 http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/8?book_id=7090353 http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/4?book_id=7090353 http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/5?book_id=7090353 http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/6?book_id=7090353 http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/7?book_id=7090353 http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/9?book_id=7090353 http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/10?book_id=7090353