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Somebody with a Little Hammer : Essays by Mary Gaitskill (2017, Hardcover)

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About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherKnopf Doubleday Publishing Group

ISBN-100307378225

ISBN-139780307378224

eBay Product ID (ePID)227677946

Product Key Features

Book TitleSomebody with a Little Hammer : Essays

Number of Pages288 Pages

LanguageEnglish

TopicPopular Culture, Essays, Human Sexuality (See Also Social Science / Human Sexuality)

Publication Year2017

GenreSocial Science, Literary Collections, Psychology

AuthorMary Gaitskill

FormatHardcover

Dimensions

Item Height1 in

Item Weight15.4 Oz

Item Length8.5 in

Item Width5.7 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceTrade

LCCN2016-031697

Reviews"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, "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)

Table Of ContentA Lot of Exploding Heads On Reading the Book of Revelation 3 The Trouble with Following the Rules On "Date Rape," "Victim Culture," and Personal Responsibility 10 A Lovely Chaotic Silliness A Review of The Fermata by Nicholson Baker 27 Toes 'n Hose A Review of From the Tip of the Toes to the Top of the Hose by Elmer Batters, and Nothing But the Girl, edited by Susie Bright and Jill Posener 30 Crackpot Mystic Spirit A Review of Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes by Greil Marcus 33 Bitch A Review of Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women by Elizabeth Wurtzel 36 Dye Hard A Review of Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates 41 Mechanical Rabbit A Review of Licks of Love by John Updike 46 I've Seen It All Thoughts on a Song by Björk 53 And It Would Not Be Wonderful to Meet a Megalosaurus On Bleak House by Charles Dickens 58 Remain in Light On the Talking Heads 71 Victims and Losers: A Love Story Thoughts on the Movie Secretary 76 The Bridge A Memoir of Saint Petersburg 85 Somebody with a Little Hammer On Teaching "Gooseberries" by Anton Chekhov 105 Enchantment and Cruelty On Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie 111 Worshipping the Overcoat An Election Diary 114 This Doughty Nose On Norman Mailer's An American Dream and The Armies of the Night 120 Lost Cat A Memoir 131 I See Their Hollowness A Review of Cockroach by Rawi Hage 180 Lives of the Hags A Review of Baba Yaga Laid an Egg by Dubravka Ugresic 185 Leave the Woman Alone! On the Never-Ending Political Extramarital Scandals 191 Master's Mind A Review of Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk 199 Imaginary Light A Song Called "Nowhere Girl" 205 Form over Feeling A Review of Out by Natsuo Kirino 210 Beg for Your Life On the Films of Laurel Nakadate 215 The Cunning of Women On One Thousand and One Nights by Hanan al-Shaykh 222 Pictures of Lo On Covering Lolita 229 The Easiest Thing to Forget On Carl Wilson's Let's Talk About Love 235 She's Supposed to Make You Sick A Review of Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn 241 Icon On Linda Lovelace 248 That Running Shadow of Your Voice On Nabokov's Letters to Véra 261 Acknowledgments 271

SynopsisFrom one of the most singular presences in American fiction comes a searingly intelligent book of essays on matters literary, social, cultural, and personal. Whether she's writing about date rape or political adultery or writers from John Updike to Gillian Flynn, Mary Gaitskill reads her subjects deftly and aphoristically and moves beyond them to locate the deep currents of longing, ambition, perversity, and loneliness in the American unconscious. She shows us the transcendentalism of the Talking Heads, the melancholy of Björk, the playfulness of artist Laurel Nakadate. She celebrates the clownish grandiosity and the poetry of Norman Mailer's long career and maps the sociosexual cataclysm embodied by porn star Linda Lovelace. And in the deceptively titled "Lost Cat," she explores how the most intimate relationships may be warped by power and race. Witty, tender, beautiful, and unsettling, Somebody with a Little Hammer displays the same heat-seeking, revelatory understanding for which we value Gaitskill's fiction., From one of the most singular presences in American fiction comes a searingly intelligent book of essays on matters literary, social, cultural, and personal. Whether she's writing about date rape or political adultery or writers from John Updike to Gillian Flynn, Mary Gaitskill reads her subjects deftly and aphoristically and moves beyond them to locate the deep currents of longing, ambition, perversity, and loneliness in the American unconscious. She shows us the transcendentalism of the Talking Heads, the melancholy of Bj rk, the playfulness of artist Laurel Nakadate. She celebrates the clownish grandiosity and the poetry of Norman Mailer's long career and maps the sociosexual cataclysm embodied by porn star Linda Lovelace. And in the deceptively titled "Lost Cat," she explores how the most intimate relationships may be warped by power and race. Witty, tender, beautiful, and unsettling, Somebody with a Little Hammer displays the same heat-seeking, revelatory understanding for which we value Gaitskill's fiction.

LC Classification NumberPS3557.A36A6 2017