Amy Gentry

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Amy Gentry

Goodreads Author


Born
in Houston, The United States
Website

Twitter

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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 · 45,045 ratings · 4,608 reviews · 13 distinct worksSimilar authors
Good as Gone

3.45 avg rating — 39,342 ratings — published 2016 — 55 editions
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My Death

by
3.88 avg rating — 5,622 ratings — published 2004 — 22 editions
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Good Behaviour

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3.88 avg rating — 4,123 ratings — published 1981 — 3 editions
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Bad Habits

3.50 avg rating — 1,542 ratings — published 2021 — 8 editions
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Last Woman Standing

3.24 avg rating — 1,548 ratings — published 2019 — 27 editions
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Boys for Pele

4.19 avg rating — 215 ratings — published 2018 — 3 editions
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I Am Stronger than Frustrat...

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4.68 avg rating — 25 ratings3 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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Appetites
Amy Gentry is currently reading
bookshelves: currently-reading
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Amy’s Recent Updates

Amy Gentry voted on a poll in the group NYRB Classics
What book would you like to read in June 2026?

Amy Gentry made a comment in the group Reading the 20th CenturyAnita Brookner topic
" Is there a buddy read scheduled for Providence, after all? Brookner has become something of a fixation for me--I've been reading and rereading her obs ...more "
Amy Gentry and 28 other people liked Edan's review of Look at Me:
Look at Me by Jennifer Egan
"Re-reading!

***

I am so hot for Jennifer Egan right now. As I read this book (about a whole lot more than a model who gets a new face after a car accident, by the way), I often had to stop and admire the fluidity of Egan's narrative, how she moved in a" Read more of this review »
Amy Gentry and 33 other people liked Lowry's review of Look at Me:
Look at Me by Jennifer Egan
"At the end of Look at Me there is an afterword from Jennifer Egan, explaining that she finished the final revision of the novel in January 2001. She goes on to say that the character of the terrorist who appears in the book, and the book itself, woul" Read more of this review »
Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard
"When he got out of that wing chair I cheered - it was honestly thrilling "
Amy Gentry wants to read
The Willow King by Meelis Friedenthal
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Reminiscences of a Student's Life by Jane Ellen Harrison
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Picasso by César Aira
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The Flint Anchor by Sylvia Townsend Warner
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One Boat by Jonathan Buckley
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More of Amy's books…
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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