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Wendy H...
459 books | 182 friends

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Amy Gentry

Goodreads Author


Born
in Houston, The United States
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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 · 45,763 ratings · 4,731 reviews · 13 distinct works • Similar authors
Good as Gone

3.45 avg rating — 39,646 ratings — published 2016 — 4 editions
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My Death

by
3.86 avg rating — 6,800 ratings — published 2004 — 23 editions
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Good Behaviour

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3.87 avg rating — 4,388 ratings — published 1981 — 47 editions
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Bad Habits

3.50 avg rating — 1,598 ratings — published 2021 — 8 editions
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Last Woman Standing

3.24 avg rating — 1,581 ratings — published 2019 — 3 editions
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Boys for Pele

4.20 avg rating — 223 ratings — published 2018 — 3 editions
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I Am Stronger than Frustrat...

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4.59 avg rating — 37 ratings — 4 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

0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings
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The Go-Between
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Clarissa, or, The...
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Amy Gentry wants to read
A Day to Remember to Forget by Rosalind Brackenbury
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The Radiant Way by Margaret Drabble
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Amy Gentry and 294 other people liked emily's review of Piranesi:
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
"possibly my favorite thing ever written"
Amy Gentry made a comment on Jan-Maat’s review of Piranesi
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
" I love your list of references and influences - many I had thought of, but I didn't think of Gormenghast, since the vibe here is so much dreamier. But ...more "
Amy Gentry and 47 other people liked Jan-Maat's review of Piranesi:
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
"Maybe I read a review of this book when it came out and concluded that it was not a book for me (view spoiler), but by the time I came across this book in the library that was all long forgotten.

Piranesi is what the narrat" Read more of this review »
Amy Gentry and 209 other people liked Baba Yaga Reads's review of Piranesi:
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
"Piranesi is fantasy in its purest form. It’s a dreamlike tale stemming from the mind of a visionary author, an author so familiar with genre tropes that she manipulates and subverts them with incredible ease.

If you, like me, have wondered why everyo" Read more of this review »
Amy Gentry rated a book it was amazing
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
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Inhaled. Could not put it down. The House is wonderfully specific, so well-realized in every sensory detail that you almost immediately feel you've been there before, in dreams or even reality. For something so elusive it's amazingly concrete. Imagin ...more
Amy Gentry wants to read
The Grandmother Plot by Caroline B. Cooney
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Before She Was Helen by Caroline B. Cooney
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The Country Girls by Edna O'Brien
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I've only read the first of the trilogy as yet. The deceptively simple narration reminded me of Barbara Comyn's Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. Scenes of gut-twisting sorrow alternate with lighter episodes, like the one where the girls desperately t ...more
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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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