Amy Gentry

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Amy Gentry

Goodreads Author


Born
in Houston, The United States
Website

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Member Since
September 2007

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Amy Gentry is the author of the novels Good as Gone, Last Woman Standing, and Bad Habits, as well as the 33 1/3 book about Tori Amos's Boys for Pele. Also a critic, she has reviewed for the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Review of Books, Paris Review, LitHub, and Electric Literature, as well as writing introductions for two books in the NYRB Classics line. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Chicago and lives in Austin, Texas. ...more

Average rating: 3.48 · 45,213 ratings · 4,634 reviews · 13 distinct worksSimilar authors
Good as Gone

3.45 avg rating — 39,425 ratings — published 2016 — 3 editions
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My Death

by
3.87 avg rating — 5,910 ratings — published 2004 — 22 editions
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Good Behaviour

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3.88 avg rating — 4,197 ratings — published 1981 — 47 editions
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Bad Habits

3.50 avg rating — 1,554 ratings — published 2021 — 8 editions
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Last Woman Standing

3.24 avg rating — 1,558 ratings — published 2019 — 27 editions
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Boys for Pele

4.19 avg rating — 218 ratings — published 2018 — 3 editions
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I Am Stronger than Frustrat...

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4.72 avg rating — 29 ratings4 editions
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Be-Hezkat Ne'ederet

it was ok 2.00 avg rating — 1 rating
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The Habit of Rising Early

0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings
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The Sparrow Sisters

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The Go-Between
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Clarissa, or, The...
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Amy’s Recent Updates

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The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark
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Witty, melancholy, light as a feather; a sharp little sliver of spinster lit under the fingernail.
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An Awfully Big Adventure by Beryl Bainbridge
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Romanticism and Its Discontents by Anita Brookner
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The Fish Can Sing by Halldór Laxness
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The Beautiful Indifference by Sarah Hall
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Amy Gentry voted on a poll in the group NYRB Classics
What book would you like to read in July 2026?

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Memed, My Hawk by Yaşar Kemal
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Tillinghast by Clare Cavenagh
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Amy Gentry rated a book really liked it
The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen by Elizabeth Bowen
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A comprehensive trip through the evolution of Elizabeth Bowen's style and subject matter, as captured in her short stories. These stories are generally thought inferior to her novels, but it's unfair to compare them. Many writers at the time honed th ...more
Incidents in the Rue Laugier by Anita Brookner
"I love Anita Brookner. Her insights into the loneliness and isolation that characterise her protagonists’ lives are painfully acute. Every time I read her, I seem to discover a new favourite, and her superb 1995 novel, Incidents in the Rue Laugier, i" Read more of this review »
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Quotes by Amy Gentry  (?)
Quotes are added by the Goodreads community and are not verified by Goodreads. (Learn more)

“This is why people need God—because people are awful, even the good ones.”
Amy Gentry, Good as Gone

“Maybe once you've been left by the most important person in your life, you can never be unleft again. Maybe you're destined to be abandoned even by your own guts, maybe your foot walks off with your thighbone, why not, stranger things have happened.”
Amy Gentry, Good as Gone

“Maybe once you’ve been left by the most important person in your life, you can never be unleft again.”
Amy Gentry, Good as Gone

Topics Mentioning This Author

“All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom. Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.”
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Beautiful writing becomes beautiful when it loses its harmony and has the desperate power of the ugly.”
Elena Ferrante, In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing

“Where have you been?" she cried. "Damn you, where have you been?" She took a few steps toward Schmendrick, but she was looking beyond him, at the unicorn.

When she tried to get by, the magician stood in her way. "You don't talk like that," he told her, still uncertain that Molly had recognized the unicorn. "Don't you know how to behave, woman? You don't curtsy, either."

But Molly pushed him aside and went up to the unicorn, scolding her as though she were a strayed milk cow. "Where have you been?" Before the whiteness and the shining horn, Molly shrank to a shrilling beetle, but this time it was the unicorn's old dark eyes that looked down.

"I am here now," she said at last.

Molly laughed with her lips flat. "And what good is it to me that you're here now? Where where you twenty years ago, ten years ago? How dare you, how dare you come to me now, when I am this?" With a flap of her hand she summed herself up: barren face, desert eyes, and yellowing heart. "I wish you had never come. Why did you come now?" The tears began to slide down the sides of her nose.

The unicorn made no reply, and Schmendrick said, "She is the last. She is the last unicorn in the world."

"She would be." Molly sniffed. "It would be the last unicorn in the world to come to Molly Grue." She reached up then to lay her hand on the unicorn's cheek; but both of them flinched a little, and the touch came to rest on on the swift, shivering place under the jaw. Molly said, "It's all right. I forgive you.”
Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

“Canadians, do not vomit on me!”
Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

“It really is a sign of appalling feebleness, I thought, if people fill their apartments with furniture belonging to past ages rather than their own, the harshness and brutality of which they are unable to endure. What they do, it seems to me, is surround themselves with the softness of the dead past that cannot answer back.”
Thomas Bernhard, Woodcutters

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message 2: by Amy

Amy Gentry Fionnuala wrote: "It wasn't me who gave the five stars to The Sacred Fount, Amy—it's the only HJ that didn't work for me. And I don't use star ratings at all. Maybe you meant the friend request for someone else? Tho..."

Ha! I may have mixed you up, but I definitely meant the friend request--I've followed you for a while and love your reviews and shelves. And I certainly don't blame anyone for disliking The Sacred Fount--it is perverse, nearly unreadable and utterly ridiculous! I am totally fascinated by it but I would never argue that it's a successful book.


Fionnuala It wasn't me who gave the five stars to The Sacred Fount, Amy—it's the only HJ that didn't work for me. And I don't use star ratings at all. Maybe you meant the friend request for someone else? Though it's true I've read all the other writers you mentioned as inspirations: Spark, Woolf, Highsmith, Brookner. I've even read Gone Girl:-(


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