Bad Behavior: Stories
“Pinteresque … Ms. Gaitskill writes with such authority, such radar-perfect detail, that she is able to make even the most extreme situations seem real … [her] reportorial candor, uncompromised by sentimentality or voyeuristic charm … underscores the strength of her debut.”
—Michiko Kakutani,
The New York Times
N
ow a classic,
Bad Behavior
made critical waves when it was first published, heralding Mary Gaitskill’s arrival on the literary scene and her establishment as one of the sharpest, erotically charged, and audaciously funny writing talents of contemporary literature.
Set in Manhattan’s Lower East Side and peopled with working-class drug addicts, intelligent hookers, stable housewives, smug yuppies, and sensually deprived professionals,
Bad Behavior
depicts a cruel and tender world where romance and modern perversity go hand in hand. Gaitskill delivers powerful stories of dislocation, longing, and desire that depict a disenchanted and rebellious urban fringe generation groping for human connection.
“Ferocious, terrifying stories, skillful as they are scary. Gaitskill’s voice and talents are wonderfully new, as honest as rain, and as welcome in a long, dry season.”
—Alice Adams
“A thrilling journey into the deep anxieties of romance and desire … Stunning.”
—Frederick Exley
“Stubbornly original, with a sort of rhythm and fine moments that flatten you out when you don’t expect it, these stories are a pleasure to read.”
—Alice Munro
MARY GAITSKILL
is the author of
Don’t Cry; Veronica
, a national Book Award finalist;
Because They Wanted To
, which was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award; and
Two Girls, Fat and Thin
. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction, her work has appeared in
The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories
, and
The O. Henry Prize Stories
.
MEET THE AUTHOR, WATCH VIDEOS, AND MORE AT
THE SOURCE FOR READING GROUPS
COVER DESIGN BY MARK ABRAMS · COVER PHOTOGRAPH © BENNO FRIEDMAN
Praise for Mary Gaitskill’s
Bad Behavior
“Mary Gaitskill [is] a vital and gifted new writer whose work has unusual importance at this time. This is a collection I urge you to read and to read right—from beginning to end. When you get to the glorious last story, denser with life than many novels, you will have to be cold-blooded indeed not to find yourself crying, as much for the joy of art as for the pity and sorrow at the secret heart of all living things.”
—George Garrett,
The New York Times Book Review
“Stubbornly original, with the sort of rhythm and fine moments that flatten you out when you don’t expect it, these stories are a pleasure to read.”
—Alice Munro
“Gaitskill writes with such authority, such radar-perfect detail, that she is able to make even the most extreme situations seem real. She takes us on a meticulously observed documentary tour of [her characters’] inner and outer lives, giving us fierce portraits of individuals rather than a gallery of eccentric types.”
—Michiko Kakutani,
The New York Times
“Intriguingly tart … urban true grit.”
—
People
“Riveting. Gaitskill has managed to lyrically reveal life’s underside.”
—
Newsday
“Gaitskill’s prose is taut, tense; sentences snap with quick twists of logic and rhythm….
Bad Behavior
vibrates with constant analysis, self-doubt and delightfully morbid analogies.”
—
Village Voice
“Funny, touching, fiercely honest, with an intelligent eye and sensitive ear on every page.”
—Leonard Michaels
ALSO BY MARY GAITSKILL
Don’t Cry
Da Capo Best Music Writing 2006
(editor)
Veronica
Because They Wanted To
Two Girls, Fat and Thin
SIMON & SCHUSTER
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1988 by Mary Gaitskill
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
Simon & Schuster trade paperback edition July 2009
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.
Designed by Kyoko Watanabe
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gaitskill, Mary.
Bad behavior : stories / Mary Gaitskill.
p. cm.
1. City and town life—New York (State)—New York—Fiction.
2. Lower East Side (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3557.A36B3 2009
813'.54—dc22 2009015579
ISBN 978-1-4391-4887-7 (print)
ISBN13: 978-1-4516-8707-1 (eBook)
To my sisters, Jane and Martha
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
—W. H. Auden,
September 1, 1939
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Daisy’s Valentine
J
OEY FELT THAT
his romance with Daisy might ruin his life, but that didn’t stop him. He liked the idea in fact. It had been a long time since he’d felt his life was in danger of further ruin, and it was fun to think it was still possible.
He worked with Daisy in the clerical department of a filthy secondhand bookstore on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The department was a square-tiled space between morose gray metal stacks of books and a dirty wall with thin white pipes running along the bottom of it. There were brown boxes of books everywhere, scatterings of paper, ashtrays, Styrofoam cups, broken chairs, the occasional flashing mouse. Customers roamed the boundaries of the area, searching for the exit. Daisy, who sat nearest the bordering aisle, was always leaving her desk to sweetly assist some baffled old man with a sweating face and cockeyed glasses.