"Gaitskill is as original in these reviews and personal essays, gathered over two decades, as she is in her fiction; from pieces on Gone Girl and Talking Heads to others on losing her cat, date rape, and born-again Christianity her trajectory may seem apparent but she often takes us to unexpected, revelatory places." --Paul S. Makishima, The Boston Globe "This collection of essays spanning two decades has the same fearless curiosity about the human psyche that Gaitskill exhibits in her fiction, along with the same unerring precision of prose . The pages burst with insight and a candid, unflinching self-assessment sure to thrill Gaitskill's existing fans and win her new ones." -- Publisher's Weekly (starred review) "Gaitskill's biting tongue and literary pyrotechnics make for a delightful combination." --Poornima Apte, Booklist -------------------- PRAISE FOR MARY GAITSKILL  "No writer is sharper about the fickle exigencies of desire." --Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker "Ambiguity--the inseparability of light and darkness, love and pain, nurture and destruction, progress and regress--is her mtier. The question she seems to ask again and again, and with astonishing force .

is how to feel, how we do feel." --Stacey D'Ersamo, The New York Times Book Review "Gaitskill's prose has never been cold, that's only what it has been called; and her writing has never been about the absence of emotion so much as its unapologetic abundance. She resists sentimentality not by banishing feeling to the white margins with understatement but by granting emotion enough space to misbehave." --Leslie Jameson, Bookforum  "Gaitskill's strange gift is to unfold emotions, no matter how petty or upsetting, and describe them with disarming patience for their stutters and silences, their repetitions and contradictions. The result often feels both primal and electric, something like a latter-day D. H. Lawrence." --Amy Gentry, Chicago Tribune  "Bracing in its rigorous truth-seeking, subtle and capacious in its moral vision, Gaitskill's work feels more real than real life, and reading her leads to a place that feels like a sacred space.

" --Priscilla Gilman, The Boston Globe.