An Evening with Mary Gaitskill
Mary Gaitskill is "among the most eloquent and perceptive of contemporary fiction writers," says The New York Times. The author of several novels including Two Girls, Fat and Thin (1998) and Veronica (2006), which was nominated for the National Book Award in 2005, as well as the story collections Don’t Cry (2010), Bad Behavior: Stories (1988), and Because They Wanted To (1998), which was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner in 1998, Gaitskill has been praised by the Village Voice as "reaching deep into what she calls the trapdoors in personality and obsession, and pulling what she finds there back out into the world. Past, present, future; heartbreak, desire, and loss: none of it is quite beyond her.”
Her story Secretary was the basis for the feature film of the same name. The film received the Special Jury Prize and was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. One of her most controversial essays, "On Not Being a Victim," appeared in Harper's. In 2002, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction; in 2010 she received a New York Public Library Cullman Center research grant.
She has taught at U.C. Berkeley, the University of Houston, New York University, The New School, Brown, and Syracuse University; she was the Writer-In-Residence at Hobart College William Smith College. She has also taught at Claremont McKenna College.
Her most recent novel is "The Mare" which was on the “Best Books of the Year" lists for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The San Francisco Chronicle.
Ms. Gaitskill’s Athenaeum talk is co-sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies.
Photo credit: Derek Shapton