Join Amazon Prime and ship Two-Day for free and Overnight for $3.99. Already a member? Sign in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
by Mary Gaitskill
|
by Mary Gaitskill
|
by Mary Gaitskill
|
by Lawrence Joseph
|
by Alicia Erian
|
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Reading a Mary Gaitskill short story is like getting into a no-holds-barred fight: mean, raw, and dangerous. She's fond of portraying characters who seem strangely comfortable living in emotional extremity. She never takes the safe route through a story; in fact, she'll choose the low road every time. The title story places a runaway girl in care of abandoned children. Where many writers would seek out some faint ray of redemption or hope, Gaitskill concentrates on the grime in the cracks of the linoleum. In "The Girl on the Plane," a bitter man confesses his participation in a brutal act to a stranger, but the confession brings no solace. These stories practically shake with tension. In the final long story of this collection, "The Wrong Thing," Gaitskill picks up the tale after the breaking point, as she gracefully illuminates the life of a woman piecing together the fragments of her sexual and emotional history. Because They Wanted not only fulfills the promise of her previous short-story collection Bad Behavior and the novel Two Girls, Fat and Thin, it takes us to a higher place. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
In "The Dentist," a story about a magazine writer's sexual infatuation with her bland, middle-aged dentist, a billboard for Obsession perfume looms over the protagonist's neighborhood, projecting a "strange arrested sensuality of unsatisfied want." Like that billboard, the nine stories in Gaitskill's third book (after the novel, Two Girls, Fat and Thin) hold a mirror up to a 30-something zeitgeist of emotional dysfunction, chronicling people paralyzed by unappeasable desires and trapped by abusive families and relationships. The landscape is a familiar one?of support groups and public health clinics, funky neighborhoods in the Pacific Northwest and lower Manhattan inhabited by writers, musicians and sex workers. With her crisp prose and withering eye for detail, Gaitskill invests these scenes with psychological vividness and desolate poignancy. The title story is a portrait of a resilient 16-year-old who runs away from home in the wake of her parent's divorce and takes a job in Vancouver babysitting for a financially desperate mother of three. The disgruntled protagonist of the opening story, "Tiny, Smiling Daddy," disturbed that his estranged lesbian daughter has published a self-help essay about him in a national magazine, ponders the divide between parents and children. In the four-part final story, "The Wrong Thing," a 39-year-old poetry teacher tries to remain stoic in the face of a series of erotic but loveless flings. It's telling that Gaitskill's title is an unfinished sentence, for the theme that binds these stories together is an emotional modality shared by a cast of unhappy people, whose sordid fantasy lives and small gestures of compassion allow them to keep at bay the meaninglessness and despair of the everyday.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
See all Editorial Reviews
Reading a Mary Gaitskill short story is like getting into a no-holds-barred fight: mean, raw, and dangerous. She's fond of portraying characters who seem strangely comfortable living in emotional extremity. She never takes the safe route through a story; in fact, she'll choose the low road every time. The title story places a runaway girl in care of abandoned children. Where many writers would seek out some faint ray of redemption or hope, Gaitskill concentrates on the grime in the cracks of the linoleum. In "The Girl on the Plane," a bitter man confesses his participation in a brutal act to a stranger, but the confession brings no solace. These stories practically shake with tension. In the final long story of this collection, "The Wrong Thing," Gaitskill picks up the tale after the breaking point, as she gracefully illuminates the life of a woman piecing together the fragments of her sexual and emotional history. Because They Wanted not only fulfills the promise of her previous short-story collection Bad Behavior and the novel Two Girls, Fat and Thin, it takes us to a higher place. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
In "The Dentist," a story about a magazine writer's sexual infatuation with her bland, middle-aged dentist, a billboard for Obsession perfume looms over the protagonist's neighborhood, projecting a "strange arrested sensuality of unsatisfied want." Like that billboard, the nine stories in Gaitskill's third book (after the novel, Two Girls, Fat and Thin) hold a mirror up to a 30-something zeitgeist of emotional dysfunction, chronicling people paralyzed by unappeasable desires and trapped by abusive families and relationships. The landscape is a familiar one?of support groups and public health clinics, funky neighborhoods in the Pacific Northwest and lower Manhattan inhabited by writers, musicians and sex workers. With her crisp prose and withering eye for detail, Gaitskill invests these scenes with psychological vividness and desolate poignancy. The title story is a portrait of a resilient 16-year-old who runs away from home in the wake of her parent's divorce and takes a job in Vancouver babysitting for a financially desperate mother of three. The disgruntled protagonist of the opening story, "Tiny, Smiling Daddy," disturbed that his estranged lesbian daughter has published a self-help essay about him in a national magazine, ponders the divide between parents and children. In the four-part final story, "The Wrong Thing," a 39-year-old poetry teacher tries to remain stoic in the face of a series of erotic but loveless flings. It's telling that Gaitskill's title is an unfinished sentence, for the theme that binds these stories together is an emotional modality shared by a cast of unhappy people, whose sordid fantasy lives and small gestures of compassion allow them to keep at bay the meaninglessness and despair of the everyday.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
See all Editorial Reviews
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
Inside This Book
(learn more)
First Sentence:
He lay in his reclining chair, barely awake enough to feel the dream moving just under his thoughts. Read the first page Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
San Francisco, King Farouk Room, Los Angeles, New York, Queen of Night, Little Friend, Brown Jug New!
Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
He lay in his reclining chair, barely awake enough to feel the dream moving just under his thoughts. Read the first page Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
San Francisco, King Farouk Room, Los Angeles, New York, Queen of Night, Little Friend, Brown Jug New!
Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 8
books:
See all 8 books this book cites
18
books
cite this book:
See all 18 books citing this book
- Dead Souls by N. Gogol on page 210
- Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill in Front Matter
- Dead Souls (Classiques Russes) (Russian Edition) by Nikolai Vasil'evich Gogol on page 210
- Dead Souls: A Novel by Nikolai Gogol on page 210
- Two Girls Fat and Thin by Mary Gaitskill in Front Matter
See all 8 books this book cites
- The Very Telling: Conversations with American Writers by Sarah Johnson on page 29, page 33, and Back Matter
- Heartbreakers: Women and Violence in Contemporary Culture and Literature by Josephine Gattuso Hendin on page 232, and Back Matter
- Bleak House (Modern Library Classics) by Charles Dickens in Front Matter
- Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women by Elizabeth Wurtzel in Back Matter
- Two Girls Fat and Thin by Mary Gaitskill in Front Matter
See all 18 books citing this book
What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?
 |
61% buy the item featured on this page: Because They Wanted to: Stories $12.35 |
 |
19% buy Bad Behavior $11.16 |
 |
10% buy Don't Cry: Stories $16.29 |
 |
5% buy Veronica $11.16 |
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Help others find this product — tag it for Amazon search
No one has tagged this product for Amazon search yet. Why not be the first to suggest a search for which it should appear?
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
Customer Discussions
Beta (What's this?)
New! See all customer communities, and bookmark your communities to keep track of them.
|
This product's forum
(0 discussions)
Ask questions, Share opinions, Gain insight
Active discussions in related forums
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
Product Information from the Amapedia Community
Beta (What's this?)Be the first person to add an article about this item at Amapedia.com.
› See featured Amapedia.com articles
Listmania!
So You'd Like to...
|
|
Look for Similar Items by Category
Need a Wrench with Great Impact? |
Buy Three Books, Get a Fourth Free |
|||||||||
|
Your Recent History
(What's this?)|
You have no recently viewed items or searches.
After viewing product detail pages or search results, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in. Look to the right column to find helpful suggestions for your shopping session. |
Continue shopping: Top Sellers
| ||||
| ||
| ||
| ||
| ||
| ||
