Don't Cry: Stories

Mary Gaitskill returns with a luminous new collection of stories--her first in more than ten years.In "College Town 1980," young people adrift in Ann Arbor, Michigan, debate the meaning of personal strength at the start of the Reagan era; in the urban fairy tale "Mirror Ball," a young man steals a girl's soul during a one-night stand; and in "The Little Boy," a woman haunted by the death of her husband is finally able to grieve through a mysterious encounter with a needy child.Each story delivers the powerful, original language and the dramatic engagement of the intelligent mind with the craving body--or of the intelligent body with the craving mind--that has come to be seen as stunningly emblematic of Gaitskill's fiction.