DONT CRY TPB – MARY GAITSKILL

An Old Virgin describes a nurse s obsession with her forty-three-year-old patient s virginity; in the urban fable Mirrorball a man steals a girl s soul during a one-night stand; College Town 1980 follows a group of listless young people adrift in Ann Arbor, debating the meaning of personal strength at the start of the Reagan era; Folk Song opens with a list of newspaper headlines before dissecting the lives of the characters behind the features, including a murderer who gives a prime-time interview and a woman from San Francisco attempting to break a world record by having sex with one thousand men. Full of jagged, lived emotion, broken people and powerful, original writing, Don t Cry is a testament to Gaitskill s formal range and incomparable excavation of character.