Synopsis
A book of short stories that are mostly about young women and their sexual adventures. Listed by Salon as one of the Ten Best Books of 1997.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1997-02-01 |
| Size | | Length: | 254 pages | | Height: | 9.0 in | | Width: | 6.0 in | | Thickness: | 1.0 in | | Weight: | 14.4 oz |
Publisher's Note
An author of Two Girls, Fat and Thin shares a collection of stories about people who want badly but, at the same time, do not quite know what they want and whose wants conflict with their deeper needs and moral sense of the world.
Industry Reviews
"[Gaitskill's] return to the short story...shows her fighting relentlessly against the simple notion of postmodern subversiveness as a liberating force....Reaching beneath this colorful surface, Gaitskill obsessively returns to one basic, ancient desire: the need to feel the worth of love....It's the quality of lament, achieved through sustained poetic tone, that takes 'Because They Wanted To' beyond the cheap thrills achieved by similar tales of the downtown down-and-out....It's hard to imagine a sadder vision of the world, yet Gaitskill shapes it with a tenderness that speaks of her larger goal."
Village Voice - Ann Powers (02/04/1997)
"Gaitskill, whose writing seems deliberately to combine mastery and jagged roughness..., only gradually provides us with two revelations. One is that under the grimness of these stories there is comedy....The other revelation is that...[her] women's voices are the voices of human alienation and disarray....Gaitskill, sometimes awkward and not always clear, has explored the darkness of her alternatives with stories that at their best are bright steel."
Los Angeles Times Book Review - Richard Eder (01/19/1997)
"Sentence by sentence, Mary Gaitskill charts the twists and turns of emotion and desire, in fanatically analytical prose that zips along in a fever of self-consciousness that would seem loony if her observations weren't so sane. Her principal topic is the sexual relations of women with men and with other women--or, to put it another way, female sexual pathology--and she sometimes seems confused....But her confusion...is appealing. She's not very confident when it comes to making judgments about anything as complicated as sex, and this uncertainty warms her stories: she has an icy eye, but there's forgiveness in her heart."
New York Times Book Review - Craig Seligman (02/09/1997)
"Gaitskill's stories see what they want to see, and they make their own world. If this is confusion, it's confusion exactly and necessarily rendered. If it's ambivalence, who needs certainty?"
Boston Book Review - Jordan Ellenberg
"Gaitskill's second collection is a return to the themes of her first, 'Bad Behavior' (1988): Bad girls misbehave and end up as profiles in sexual pathology. For all their naughty sex talk, there's very little pleasure--Gaitskill's women are too brittle and nervous, forever exhausted by their unusual tastes, to take much relish in life....Gaitskill continues to explore the margins of human sexuality in stories distinguished by their strange terrain rather than by their exceptional skill."
Plunket
"Like Gaitskill's first, titillating collection, these stories--although about various characters and told from various perspectives--seem to illuminate moments in the life of a single persona....These accounts...go beyond mere subjectivity in the minuteness with which they record emotional nuance.
Trachtman
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