First published 1988
In the gritty streets of Manhattan's Lower East Side, characters chase connection through a maze of desire and disappointment. A prostitute weighs her feelings for a client against her need for money. A housewife discovers her husband's secret appetites. Young professionals stumble through relationships that blur affection with exploitation. Drug addicts seek fleeting intimacy between fixes while upwardly mobile couples play power games in expensive apartments. Each story reveals people hungry for genuine feeling in a world that commodifies everything, including love. Gaitskill places her characters at moments when their careful defenses crack open, exposing the raw need underneath. The city itself becomes a character, its harsh beauty reflecting the contradictions of its inhabitants. These men and women hurt each other and themselves, yet they keep reaching across the void that separates them. Their encounters are brutal and surprisingly gentle, sometimes within the same breath. The emotional core pulses with the recognition that cruelty and tenderness often spring from the same desperate source.
Genres: fiction, short-stories, literary-fiction, contemporary
Vibes: emotional, gritty, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: character-driven, emotional-journey, slice-of-life
Setting: Lower East Side, Manhattan
Period: Contemporary
208 pages · Hardcover · Simon & Schuster
Content warnings: addiction, explicit-sexual-content