Books like Don't Cry

Following the extraordinary success of her novel Veronica, Mary Gaitskill returns with a luminous new collection of stories — her first in more than ten years.Beginning with a story of young people adrift in the college town of Ann Arbor on the cusp of the Reagan era and ending with the complex quest of a middle-aged woman to adopt a child in Addis Ababa, Gaitskill works across a broad backdrop of American life and brilliantly delivers her signature pleasures: prose as taut as a high-tension line, a supreme command of the interior landscape, and characters as real as the secret faces that peer back at us from the mirror. Each story is charged with her powerful, original language and the dramatic engagement of the intelligent mind with the craving body — or the intelligent body with the craving mind — that is characteristic of Gaitskill's fiction. Her settings are a surprising mix of real and surreal: in the urban fairy tale "Mirror Ball" a young man steals a girl's soul during a one-night stand, while in the stunning "The Arms and Legs of the Lake" the fallout of the Iraq War becomes painfully immediate for a group of characters who collide by chance on a train going up the Hudson River.As spirited and intense as the now-classic Bad Behavior, Don't Cry shows us how our social conscience has evolved while basic truths — "the crude cinder blocks of male and female down in the basement, holding up the house," as one character puts it — remain unchanged.