Mary Gaitskill

“I get very disturbed when I feel something is being presented in an overly broad way. I have a nuanced mind, for better and worse.”

National Book Award Finalist

National Book Critics Award Finalist

Guggenheim Fellow

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“What is most amazing about Gaitskill is her ability to portray the heart of human longing and suffering, and to see in each gesture of our lives the disturbing and conflicting pool of drives that marks our every gesture.”

— Sheila Heti

“Devotees of Gaitskill’s work are likely to appreciate the opportunity to revisit her masterworks on something of a guided tour where the author herself is able to instruct us... This impressionistic construction rewards those looking for a deeper connection to Gaitskill’s rigorous imagination.”

— Kirkus Reviews on The Devil's Treasure

“Incendiary . . . Enigmatic and ambiguous . . . In This Is Pleasure, one of our greatest living writers brings to the most inflammatory of topics nuance, subtlety, and a capacious humanity that grants mercy even as it never excuses.”

— The Boston Globe

“As in her fiction, Gaitskill sees everything . . . The essays in Somebody with a Little Hammer . . . further establish her as the important critical thinker she’s always been. Her extreme sensitivity makes her one of the most reliable witnesses to life in the US.”

— Chris Kraus

“Ms. Gaitskill is such a preternaturally gifted writer that nearly every page of “The Mare” shimmers with exacting and sometimes hallucinatory observation.”

— The New York Times

“Ms. Gaitskill is such a preternaturally gifted writer that nearly every page of “The Mare” shimmers with exacting and sometimes hallucinatory observation.”

— Publisher's Weekly

Mary Gaitskill is the author of novels, short stories, and essays. Her most recent book is the hybrid work The Devil’s Treasure (ZE Books, 2021), which creates a collage out of her previous works, connected by the thread of a new short story. In 2019, she published the widely-acclaimed This is Pleasure (Pantheon), which The Guardian praised as “formidable.” Other works include the essay collection, Somebody with a Little Hammer (Pantheon, 2017), the novels The Mare (Vintage, 2015), long listed for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Veronica (Vintage 2013), a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and Two Girls, Fat and Thin (Simon & Schuster, 1991.) She is also the author of the story collections Bad Behavior (Simon & Schuster, 2012), Don’t Cry (Pantheon, 2009), and Because They Wanted To (Simon & Schuster, 1997) which was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner in 1998. Her story “Secretary” was the basis for the feature film of the same name starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader.

Gaitskill’s stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction and a Cullman Research Fellowship at the New York Public Library, an Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Hopwood Award.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Gaitskill said, “I think people have a very strong need for order, for social order, and love is a very disorderly emotion. It can be very destructive or just change things a lot. There’s something in people that wants things to stay a certain way.”

Gaitskill has taught at the University of California Berkeley, the University of Houston, New York University, Brown, and Syracuse University. Born in Lexington, KY, she currently lives in New York State’s Hudson Valley.

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