"Velveteen Vargas is eleven years old, a Fresh Air Fund kid from Brooklyn. Her host family is a couple in upstate New York: Ginger, a failed artist and shakily recovered alcoholic, and her academic husband, Paul. Gaitskill illuminates their shifting relationships over several years, as well as Velvet's encounter with the horses at the stable down the road. Mare is the story of a girl and a horse, joined with a story of people from different races...

Mary Gaitskill returns with a luminous new collection of stories—her first in more than ten years. In “College Town l980,” young people adrift in Ann Arbor debate the meaning of personal strength at the start of the Reagan era; in the urban fairy tale “Mirrorball,” a young man steals a girl’s soul during a one-night stand; in “The Little Boy,” a woman haunted by the death of her former husband is finally...

This is a reissue of National Book Award finalist Mary Gaitskill's debut collection, Bad Behavior—powerful stories about dislocation, longing, and desire, which depict a disenchanted and rebellious urban-fringe generation as it searches for human connection.

Now a classic, Bad Behavior made critical waves when it was first published, heralding Gaitskill's arrival on the literary scene and her establishment as a sharp, erotically charged,

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"In this powerful short fiction, Mary Gaitskill--whose searing honesty about gender relations has been legendary since the appearance of Bad Behavior in the 1980s--considers our moment through the lens of a particular #metoo incident. The effervescent and well-dressed Quin, a successful book editor and fixture on the New York arts scene, has long been one of Margot's best friends. When several women in his field accuse him of inappropriate touching...

"Collects forty short stories published between 1915 and 2015, from writers that include Ernest Hemingway, John Updike, and Alice Munro that exemplify their era and stand the test of time." --