DONT CRY

Mary Gaitskill returns with a luminous new collection of stories-her first in more than ten years. In "College Town l980," young people adrift in Ann Arbor debate the meaning of personal strength at the start of the Reagan era; in the urban fairy tale "Mirrorball," a young man steals a girl's soul during a one-night stand; in "The Little Boy," a woman haunted by the death of her former husband is finally able to grieve through a mysterious encounter with a needy child. Each story delivers the powerful, original language, and the dramatic engagement of the intelligent mind with the craving body-or of the intelligent body with the craving mind-that has come to be seen as stunningly emblematic of Gaitskill's fiction.