All the Stars in the Heavens
Adriana Trigiani, 2015
HarperCollins
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062319203
Summary
A Tale of the golden age of Hollywood, All the Stars in Heaven captures the luster, drama, power, and secrets that could only thrive in the studio system—viewed through the lives of an unforgettable cast of players creating magic on the screen and behind the scenes.
In this spectacular saga as radiant, thrilling, and beguiling as Hollywood itself, Adriana Trigiani takes us back to Tinsel Town's golden age—an era as brutal as it was resplendent—and into the complex and glamorous world of a young actress hungry for fame and success.
With meticulous, beautiful detail, Trigiani paints a rich, historical landscape of 1930s Los Angeles, where European and American artisans flocked to pursue the ultimate dream: to tell stories on the silver screen.
The movie business is booming in 1935 when twenty-one-year-old Loretta Young meets thirty-four-year-old Clark Gable on the set of The Call of the Wild. Though he's already married, Gable falls for the stunning and vivacious young actress instantly.
Far from the glittering lights of Hollywood, Sister Alda Ducci has been forced to leave her convent and begin a new journey that leads her to Loretta. Becoming Miss Young's secretary, the innocent and pious young Alda must navigate the wild terrain of Hollywood with fierce determination and a moral code that derives from her Italian roots.
Over the course of decades, she and Loretta encounter scandal and adventure, choose love and passion, and forge an enduring bond of love and loyalty that will be put to the test when they eventually face the greatest obstacle of their lives.
Anchored by Trigiani's masterful storytelling that takes you on a worldwide ride of adventure from Hollywood to the shores of southern Italy, this mesmerizing epic is, at its heart, a luminous tale of the most cherished ties that bind.
Brimming with larger-than-life characters both real and fictional—including stars Spencer Tracy, Myrna Loy, David Niven, Hattie McDaniel and more—it is it is the unforgettable story of one of cinema's greatest love affairs during the golden age of American movie making. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1960
• Where—Big Stone Gap, Virginia, USA
• Education—B.A., St. Mary’s College, Indiana
• Currently—lives in New York, New York
As her squadrons of fans already know, Adriana Trigiani grew up in Big Stone Gap, a coal-mining town in southwest Virginia that became the setting for her first three novels. The "Big Stone Gap" books feature Southern storytelling with a twist: a heroine of Italian descent, like Trigiani, who attended St. Mary's College of Notre Dame, like Trigiani. But the series isn't autobiographical—the narrator, Ave Maria Mulligan, is a generation older than Trigiani and, as the first book opens, has settled into small-town spinsterhood as the local pharmacist.
The author, by contrast, has lived most of her adult life in New York City. After graduating from college with a theater degree, she moved to the city and began writing and directing plays (her day jobs included cook, nanny, house cleaner and office temp). In 1988, she was tapped to write for the Cosby Show spinoff A Different World, and spent the following decade working in television and film. When she presented her friend and agent Suzanne Gluck with a screenplay about Big Stone Gap, Gluck suggested she turn it into a novel.
The result was an instant bestseller that won praise from fellow writers along with kudos from celebrities (Whoopi Goldberg is a fan). It was followed by Big Cherry Holler and Milk Glass Moon, which chronicle the further adventures of Ave Maria through marriage and motherhood. People magazine called them "Delightfully quirky... chock full of engaging, oddball characters and unexpected plot twists."
Critics sometimes reach for food imagery to describe Trigiani's books, which have been called "mouthwatering as fried chicken and biscuits" (USA Today) and "comforting as a mug of tea on a rainy Sunday" (New York Times Book Review). Food and cooking play a big role in the lives of Trigiani's heroines and their families: Lucia, Lucia, about a seamstress in Greenwich Village in the 1950s, and The Queen of the Big Time, set in an Italian-American community in Pennsylvania, both feature recipes from Trigiani's grandmothers. She and her sisters have even co-written a cookbook called, appropriately enough, Cooking With My Sisters: One Hundred Years of Family Recipes, from Bari to Big Stone Gap. It's peppered with anecdotes, photos and family history. What it doesn't have: low-carb recipes. "An Italian girl can only go so long without pasta," Trigiani quipped in an interview on GoTriCities.com.
Her heroines are also ardent readers, so it comes as no surprise that book groups love Adriana Trigiani. And she loves them right back. She's chatted with scores of them on the phone, and her Web site includes photos of women gathered together in living rooms and restaurants across the country, waving Italian flags and copies of Lucia, Lucia.
Trigiani, a disciplined writer whose schedule for writing her first novel included stints from 3 a.m. to 8 a.m. each morning, is determined not to disappoint her fans. So far, she's produced a new novel each year since the publication of Big Stone Gap.I don't take any of it for granted, not for one second, because I know how hard this is to catch with your public," she said in an interview with The Independent. "I don't look at my public as a group; I look at them like individuals, so if a reader writes and says, 'I don't like this,' or, 'This bit stinks,' I take it to heart.
Extras
From a 2004 Barnes & Noble interview:
• I appeared on the game show Kiddie Kollege on WCYB-TV in Bristol, Virginia, when I was in the third grade. I missed every question. It was humiliating.
• I have held the following jobs: office temp, ticket seller in movie theatre, cook in restaurant, nanny, and phone installer at the Super Bowl in New Orleans. In the writing world, I have been a playwright, television writer/producer, documentary writer/director, and now novelist.
• I love rhinestones, faux jewelry. I bought a pair of pearl studded clip on earrings from a blanket on the street when I first moved to New York for a dollar. They turned out to be a pair designed by Elsa Schiaparelli. Now, they are costume, but they are still Schiaps! Always shop in the street—treasures aplenty.
• When asked what book most influenced her life as a writer, here is what she said:
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. When I was a girl growing up in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, I was in the middle of a large Italian family, but I related to the lonely orphan girl Jane, who with calm and focus, put one foot in front of the other to make a life for herself after the death of her parents and her terrible tenure with her mean relatives. She survived the horrors of the orphanage Lowood, losing her best friend to consumption, became a teacher and then a nanny. The love story with the complicated Rochester was interesting to me, but what moved me the most was Jane's character, in particular her sterling moral code. Here was a girl who had no reason to do the right thing, she was born poor and had no connections and yet, somehow she was instinctively good and decent. It's a story of personal triumph and the beauty of human strength. I also find the book a total page turner- and it's one of those stories that you become engrossed in, unable to put it down. Imagine the beauty of the line: "I loved and was loved." It doesn't get any better than that! (Bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Trigiani’s newest fictionalizes Loretta Young’s life, both through her eyes and those of an invented personal secretary, whose closeness with the actress ties the narrative threads together.... [I]mpeccable research and lush writing.
Publishers Weekly
Trigiani re-creates the golden age of Hollywood...[in] rich, sumptuous detail.... Her ability to breathe life into the luminous cast of characters, which includes Spencer Tracy, Myrna Loy, David Niven, and Carole Lombard, will captivate readers, then have them scouring Netflix for film classics of the 1930s. —Jeanne Bogino, New Lebanon Lib., NY
Library Journal
A novice nun suddenly finds herself dismissed from her convent and swept up into the heady world of Hollywood's golden age.... Trigiani...spins a tale of star-crossed lovers, yet the rather flat prose dims the glow of the silver screen. A heartwarming tale of women's lives behind the movies.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)
The Thing About Jellyfish
Ali Benjamin, 2015
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316380867
Summary
Benjamin's first solo novel has appeal well beyond a middle school audience (Kirkus Reviews).
Grief can open the world in magical ways.
After her best friend dies in a drowning accident, Suzy is convinced that the true cause of the tragedy was a rare jellyfish sting.
Retreating into a silent world of imagination, she crafts a plan to prove her theory—even if it means traveling the globe, alone. Suzy's achingly heartfelt journey explores life, death, the astonishing wonder of the universe...and the potential for love and hope right next door. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Her own words—
I’ve written about astrophysicists and athletes, cosmologists and Arctic conservators, geologists and psychologists and farmers and awesome children. What I enjoy, above all, is telling a good story. This world of ours is complex, but it’s filled with plenty of wonder and sparkle.
I am the author of The Thing About Jellyfish (2015), as well as the co-author of three other books: Tim Howard’s The Keeper (2014), both the adult and young readers’ editions; Paige Rawl’s Positive (2014), a coming-of-age memoir, which was a Junior Library Guild selection and the first-ever nonfiction selection for The Today Show book club; and, with Beth Bader, The Cleaner Plate Club (2010).
I’m currently at work on 200 Million Miles, a novel about people on Earth dreaming of Mars, to be published in 2016
In addition to the books I’ve written, I’ve also written for the Boston Globe Magazine, Martha Stewart’s Whole Living Online, and I was the sole story researcher/casting director for the hour-long primetime special, Sesame Street: Growing Hope Against Hunger, which won a 2012 Emmy Award. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
[H]eartfelt and fascinating…Benjamin explores the heartbreaking subject of grief in the young with dreamy, meditative and elegiac prose. She successfully captures the anxieties of middle school through Suzy's confusion and pain…The dedication of The Thing About Jellyfish reads, "For curious kids everywhere." It could also read, "For all those kids who need a gentle nudge to look closer at nature and science." Or perhaps, "For grieving kids who are struggling to come to terms with their losses, and seeking a path to peace and conciliation." There are, in other words, a lot of children who might not only benefit from this book but also find themselves deeply moved by it.
Jacqueline Kelly - New York Times Book Review
(Starred review.) [A] moving portrayal of loss and healing.... 12-year-old Suzy channels the conflicting emotions surrounding Franny’s drowning death into silence.... Benjamin’s novel is a shining example of the highs and lows of early adolescence, as well as a testament to the grandeur of the natural world (ages 8–12).
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) With elegant prose, the author captures the voice of a brilliant but lonely twelve-year-old girl struggling with loss.... This novel has it all: just-right pacing, authentic voices and characters, beautifully crafted plot, and superb writing (ages 11 to 18).
VOYA
Suzy's best friend, Franny Jackson, was a strong swimmer. There is no way she could have drowned, at least in Suzy's mind. Suzy's determined search for a different explanation for her friend's death leads her to believe that Franny was stung by an Irukandji jellyfish.... [A] superbly written, heartfelt novel (grades 4-7). —Juliet Morefield, Multnomah County Library, OR
School Library Journal
(Starred review.) Benjamin's involving novel features clean, fluid writing that is highly accessible, yet rich with possibilities for discussion.... Her highly individual, first-person narrative makes compelling reading.... An uncommonly fine first novel.
Booklist
(Starred review.) Surrounded by the cruelty of adolescence, Zu is awkward, smart, methodical, and driven by sadness. She eventually follows her research far beyond the middle school norm, because "Sometimes things just happen" is not an explanation.... A painful story smartly told (ages 12 & up).
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)
The Sunlit Night
Rebecca Dinerstein, 2015
Bloomsbury (USA)
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781632861122
Summary
In the beautiful, barren landscape of the Far North, under the ever-present midnight sun, Frances and Yasha are surprised to find refuge in each other.
Their lives have been upended—Frances has fled heartbreak and claustrophobic Manhattan for an isolated artist colony; Yasha, a Russian immigrant raised in a bakery in Brighton Beach, arrives from Brooklyn to fulfill his beloved father's last wish: to be buried "at the top of the world." They have come to learn how to be alone.
But in Lofoten, an archipelago of six tiny islands in the Norwegian Sea, ninety-five miles north of the Arctic Circle, they form a bond that fortifies them against the turmoil of their distant homes, offering solace amidst great uncertainty.
With nimble and sure-footed prose enriched with humor and warmth, Dinerstein reveals that no matter how far we travel to claim our own territory, it is ultimately love that gives us our place in the world. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1987-88
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Yale; M.F.A., New York University
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City, New York
Rebecca Dinerstein is the author of Lofoten (2012), a bilingual English-Norwegian collection of poems, and The Sunlit Night (2015), her debut novel. She received her B.A. from Yale and her M.F.A. in Fiction from New York University, where she was a Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellow.
Upon receving her B.A., Dinerstein traveled to a Norwegian artist's colony where she stayed for a year to write poetry. The colony was located on the site of an abandoned asylum for the insane—in Lofoten—an archipelago in the Norwegian Arctic. “I wanted to go as far north as I could,” she has said. Lofoten became the title of her poetry collection, as well as the setting of her novel. Dinerstein now lives in Brooklyn, New York City. (Adapted from the publisher and The Telegraph.)
Visit the author's website.
Book Reviews
The Norwegian Arctic of Dinerstein's imagination is a strange and wonderful place, half stark wilderness and half Scandi-kitsch paradise…the pleasure of The Sunlit Night derives less from [Yasha and Frances's] story than from the joyfully odd landscape Dinerstein conjures, in which certain absurdities begin to seem quite natural…
Britt Peterson - New York Times Book Review
Dinerstein's crystalline prose floats off the page, her storytelling delights and surprises. She takes on the travails, absurdities and human failings with warmth and humor, embracing it all and reminding us through her characters to do the same.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Refreshing.... The author is a poet so the prose is, not surprisingly, lyrical but it's observant and witty, too.
Daily Mail (UK)
Dinerstein's much buzzed-about debut novel is a fanciful Arctic Circle romance between a Russian immigrant raised in a Brighton Beach bakery and a Manhattanite seeking refuge from family problems in a Norwegian artists' colony.
Forward
Engaging and alive.... The Sunlit Night heralds the beginning of an intriguing career in fiction during which Dinerstein will hopefully continue to take us off the beaten path.
Huffington Post
(Starred review.) In Dinerstein’s captivating debut novel, an isolated island above the Arctic Circle is the setting for two people trying to surmount grief and find love.... With provocative insights about the cruelty of abandonment, the concept of home, and the limits of parental and filial love, Dinerstein’s novel is a rich reading experience.
Publishers Weekly
The disorienting "midnight sun" of summer near the Arctic Circle creates a mystical setting as the characters work out their personal and family dilemmas. New Yorkers Frances and Yasha (both immensely likable characters) experience profound culture shock in the sparsely populated town and yearn to connect with each other. —Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis
Library Journal
At the very top of the world, two lonely outsiders find comfort in each other in Dinerstein's deliciously melancholy debut.... Frances and Yasha—united by their separate losses...fall into an unlikely kind of romance. Dinerstein's writing is light and lyrical, and her descriptions of the far north are intoxicating.... A poetic premise with language to match.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Why do you think Rebecca Dinerstein chose to introduce us to Frances in the context of her relationship with Robert Mason? How does she see the Masons in comparison with her "desperately artistic" (21) family?
2. Examine the role of landscape in The Sunlit Night, from urban to wild, Brooklyn to Borg.
3. Frances says of her family: "The only way we knew how to be was in each other's way" (16). The layout of their apartment certainly reflects this reality, but in what other ways do the members of Frances's family intrude on one another? What seems to be Frances's role in the family, and how does that role affect her?
4. Consider Olyana's first appearance at the bakery. How did your understanding of her reason for being there change over the course of her stay? Yasha reflects on a strong memory of sharing a bar of milk chocolate with his mother. How does this memory—and her recurring association with sweets—set the tone for Olyana's character?
5. Upon meeting Nils, Frances thinks: "Here was mankind in his original state...in all his innocence" (69). What do you think is his impression of her? Do they see each other clearly? Is Frances right about their "unfulfilled romance" (164)?
6. The narration of The Sunlit Night switches from first- to third-person as it moves between Frances and Yasha. Why do you think the author made this choice? Were you surprised to encounter Frances from an outside perspective? Why or why not?
7. Consider Vassily's funeral at Eggum. Frances claims her body is "confused about grief.... I'm not laughing. I'm shaking" (127). What other aspects of this ceremony struck you as unusual or "confused about grief"? What affect did they have? What do you think would have been Vassily's reaction to this ceremony?
8. Yasha thinks, "His mother, and Frances—they did not seem tied to the idea of place. They were the anywhere sort" (140). In the world of this novel, what connects a person to place? Which characters, if any, have achieved that connection by the end? Explain.
9. Consider the use of Norse mythology in The Sunlit Night from the Yggdrasil tree sculpture to Olyana's Valkyrie costume. What links can be made between the real world of the novel and the mythological one Haldor presides over at the Viking Museum?
10. While the first four parts of the novel have places for names, the fifth has a time period—"The Other Season"—during which the narrative jumps swiftly between Frances and Yasha. How did this shift affect your understanding of their relationship and its future? Why was it important for Yasha to stay in Lofoten for part of "the other season"?
11. A sense of professional failure weighs heavily on Frances's father. "What does it matter if you do what you love, if what you love doesn't matter?" (12), he asks her. What conclusions, if any, does the novel reach about this question, particularly with regard to being an artist?
12. Rebecca Dinerstein's first book, Lofoten, is a work of poetry. Choose a passage from The Sunlit Night that feels especially lyrical and discuss its poetic use of language.
(Questions issued by Bloomsbury Publishing.)
The Rocks
Peter Nichols, 2015
Penguin Books
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594633317
Summary
A romantic page-turner propelled by the sixty-year secret that has shaped two families, four lovers, and one seaside resort community.
Set against dramatic Mediterranean Sea views and lush olive groves, The Rocks opens with a confrontation and a secret: What was the mysterious, catastrophic event that drove two honeymooners apart so suddenly and absolutely in 1948 that they never spoke again despite living on the same island for sixty more years?
And how did their history shape the Romeo and Juliet–like romance of their (unrelated) children decades later? Centered around a popular seaside resort club and its community, The Rocks is a double love story that begins with a mystery, then moves backward in time, era by era, to unravel what really happened decades earlier.
Peter Nichols writes with a pervading, soulful wisdom and self-knowing humor, and captures perfectly this world of glamorous, complicated, misbehaving types with all their sophisticated flaws and genuine longing.
The result is a bittersweet, intelligent, and romantic novel about how powerful the perceived truth can be—as a bond, and as a barrier—even if it’s not really the whole story; and how one misunderstanding can echo irreparably through decades. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Peter Nichols has worked in advertising and as a screenwriter and a shepherd in Wales, and he has sailed alone across the Atlantic. He divides his time between Europe and the United States. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
The Rocks is a tragic double romance, told in reverse, primarily set on Mallorca. Superficially, it's a sort of mash-up of Jim Crace's Being Dead and Jess Walter's Beautiful Ruins. It begins in 2005 and runs back through time all the way to 1948, retracing the events precipitated by the novel's "inciting incident," whose final repercussion opens the book. This might sound confusing, but it isn't, because Nichols has a firm grasp of the chronology and a clear sense of control over the novel's trajectory and purpose: to illuminate the wreckage of romantic love and the end of a marriage, and, finally, to reveal the mystery at the heart of its death.
Kate Christensen - New York Times Book Review
Mr. Nichols takes the reader on a 400-page odyssey that includes a crooked real-estate deal, a hair-raising drug run in Morocco and enough sexual encounters to keep the summer beach reader breathlessly turning the page. Throughout it all, Mr. Nichols’s writing is witty and erudite.
Wall Street Journal
It’s the perfect beach read, with romance, mystery, humor, and drama all set on a tiny island in the Mediterranean Sea.
Boston Globe
We hear the rueful hum of real life, full of possibilities seized but mostly missed. And we grow wealthier by the page.
USA Today
[What] smart, sexy summer lit is invariably made of.... The Rocks has all the requisite romance and intrigue of good melodrama—and its settings are so postcard-gorgeous you can almost taste the sea spray and cold horchata—but there’s real wit and substance in his storytelling. Think of it as a beach read you’ll respect in the morning.
Entertainment Weekly
This page-turner will transport readers to the sunny community of expats at a glamorous seaside resort, where mystery, love, and family legacy are all fiercely intertwined.
Harper's Bazaar
[The Rocks is] constructed to keep the reader guessing..... So we keep turning the pages not to discover what will happen, but to find out what has already occurred. Along the way, there are sumptuous lunches served on yachts, exotic couples met while traveling in Morocco, older women seducing much younger men.
Oprah Magazine
(Starred review.) [T]wo central stories engage the readers’ sympathies and emotions, while Nichols colors in the background with the...louche exploits of the careless adults and the tanned teenagers who...have a harder time growing up beyond the endless summer.
Publishers Weekly
The problem is that Lulu is mostly unlikable....there's something disturbed about Lulu.... [R]eaders hoping for [a] winsome, humorous, hopeful love story will be disappointed. Nichols has written more of a tragedy, with the only glimmer of light coming in the final pages. —Christine Perkins, Whatcom Cty. Lib. Syst., Bellingham, WA
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Nichols deftly melds comedy and compassion, and his rendering of his Mediterranean setting will have readers packing their bags.
Booklist
(Starred review.) As intoxicating as a long afternoon sitting at the bar at The Rocks.... All of it is absolutely riveting, leaving the reader desperate to depart immediately for swoony Mallorca.... Nichols' expertise on everything from the Odyssey to olive oil to classic movies enriches the story, as does his profound understanding of his screwed-up cast of characters.... A literary island vacation with a worldly, wonderfully salacious storyteller.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The Rocks is a novel that experiments with the chronology of storytelling, unfurling backward through time. What did you think about the way that time was handled in the narrative? Did it affect the way you related to the story and characters? Did it make the story feel more—or less—propulsive?
2. Consider the parallel relationships between Aegina and Luc, Lulu and Gerald. How are these two relationships similar, and how they are different? To what degree is Aegina and Luc’s relationship shaped by the dynamic between their parents?
3. How did you interpret the ending with Luc and Aegina? Was it clear or ambiguous? Light or dark? How did you feel about the author’s decisions there?
4. From the beginning of the book we understand that there is a secret at the foundation of Lulu and Gerald’s split, and that it may be based on a tragic misunderstanding. The book then spirals backward through time to get to that past secret. Were you surprised when you found out the truth? Was it what you expected? Were you satisfied?
5. The book covers sixty years of life on the island of Mallorca. What changes do we see on the island over this time? How are they reflected in the people who live and visit there? Do you see reciprocal changes between the island and the people? That is, do the people change the island, or does the island change the people? In what ways?
6. What do you think the author is saying about expat culture and the people who build lives outside of their home countries? Discuss the positive and negative outcomes of such a decision.
7. Consider the cultural knowledge the book imparts—about the Odyssey, olive oil production, classic films and Hollywood… What can we learn about other parts of the world from the specific details the author brings to the page? How can reading a book like The Rocks inform us about cultural norms, traditions, and expectations?
8. Peter Nichols is an American who went to school in England and spent summers on Mallorca with his family. Since then he has lived all over the world and held a variety of jobs. After a successful career as a nonfiction writer, he turned to fiction and The Rocks. How do you think the author’s experience and biography may have shaped this book?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
top of page (summary)
The Mare
Mary Gaitskill, 2015
Knopf Doubleday
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307379740
Summary
The story of a Dominican girl, the Anglo woman who introduces her to riding, and the horse who changes everything for her.
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, who wonder what it will mean to “make a difference” in such a contrived situation.
Gaitskill illuminates their shifting relationship with Velvet over several years, as well as Velvet’s encounter with the horses at the stable down the road—especially with an abused, unruly mare called Fugly Girl.
With strong supporting characters—Velvet’s abusive mother, an eccentric horse trainer, a charismatic older boy who awakens Velvet’s nascent passion—The Mare traces Velvet’s journey between the vital, violent world of the inner city and the world of the small-town stable.
In Gaitskill’s hands, the timeless story of a girl and a horse is joined with a timely story of people from different races and classes trying to meet one another honestly. The Mare is raw, heart-stirring, and original. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—November 11, 1954
• Where—Lexington, Kentucky, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Michigan
• Currently—Rhinebeck, New York
Mary Gaitskill is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories (1993, 2006, 2012), and The O. Henry Prize Stories (1998).
Personal
Gaitskill was born in Lexington, Kentucky and attended the University of Michigan, where she earned her B.A. and won a Hopwood Award.
She has lived in New York City, Toronto, the Bay Area in California, where she sold flowers in San Francisco as a teenage runaway. In a conversation with novelist and short story writer Matthew Sharpe for BOMB Magazine, Gaitskill said she had wanted to become a writer from the age of 18 because "things are wrong in the world and I must say something.'"
Gaitskill married the writer Peter Trachtenberg in 2001. They separated in 2010. Gaitskill lives in Rhinebeck, New York.
Writing
Hoping to get pubished from the time she turned 21, Gaitskill finally made her book debut at the age of 34, with her 1988 story collection Bad Behavior. "Secretary," a story from the collection, deals with sadomasochism and is the basis for the 2002 film of the same name. Starring James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal, the film according to Gaitskill has little in common with the story. Gaitskill referred to the adaptation as "the Pretty Woman version, heavy on the charm (and a little too nice)."
Gaitskill's fiction typically centers on the inner conflicts of female characters and on subject matter often deemed taboo—not only sadomasochism but also prostitution and addiction. Gaitskill has been open about her own career choices, saying she had worked as both a stripper and call girl. She showed similar candor discussing her own rape in a Harper's essay, "On Not Being a Victim.
Recognition
Gaitskill's honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002 and a 1998 PEN/Faulkner Award nomination for Because They Wanted To. Her novel Veronica (2005) was a National Book Award nominee, as well as a National Book Critics Circle finalist for that year. That book is narrated by a former fashion model and centers on her friend Veronica who contracts AIDS. Writing in a 2006 Harper's article, Wyatt Mason said:
Through four books over eighteen years, Mary Gaitskill has been formulating her fiction around the immutable question of how we manage to live in a seemingly inscrutable world. In the past, she has described, with clarity and vision, the places in life where we sometimes get painfully caught. Until Veronica, however, she had never ventured to show fully how life could also be made a place where, despite all, we find meaningful release.
Gaitskill's favorite writers have changed over time, but one constant has been Vladimir Nabokov, whose Lolita, she has said, "will be on my ten favorites list until the end of my life." Another consistently named influence is Flannery O'Connor. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/7/2015.)
Book Reviews
[An] 11-year-old Dominican-American...[girl from] Brooklyn is invited to spend a few weeks with a white couple in upstate New York.... Gaitskill is renowned for her edgy writing, but the book...treads into stereotype. More nuanced portrayals might have made Velvet’s bumpy growth into an independent young woman more palatable.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Gaitskill spares no one in this brutally honest story of poverty, bigotry, the secret life of adolescents looking for love and acceptance in all the wrong places, and parental and marital dysfunction. The major and minor voices narrating this brilliant tapestry are wondrously original, poignant, and, despite all, not without hope. —Beth Andersen, formerly with Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Gaitskill takes a premise that could have been preachy, sentimental, or simplistic—juxtaposing urban and rural, rich and poor, young and old, brown and white—and makes it candid and emotionally complex, spare, real, and deeply affecting. She explores the complexities of love (mares, mères...) to bring us a novel that gallops along like a bracing bareback ride on a powerful thoroughbred.”
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)