What do you think?
Rate this book
The Devil's Treasure
"The Devil's Treasure" is a tale of a young girl visiting Hell from acclaimed writer Mary Gaitskill's novel-in-progress.
"Now Ginger was not Ginger. She was starved hurting limbs. She was a dried sore mouth and eyes. She was a straining heart. She was legs that stumbled as they were pulled forward by the mass of driven bodies."
In his editor's note, founding editor of Electric Liteature Andy Hunter compares his two favorite authors of short "Like Flannery O'Connor, Ms. Gaitskill has an unsparing intuition for people’s weaknesses and motives, and she creates exquisitely drawn characters living in a ragged world where things matter."
Great authors inspire us. But what about the stories that inspire them? Recommended Reading, the latest project from Electric Literature, publishes one story every week, each chosen by a great author or editor. In this age of distraction, we uncover writing that's worth slowing down and spending some time with. And in doing so, we help give great writers, literary magazines, and independent presses the recognition (and readership) they deserve.
Mary Gaitskill is the author of the novels Two Girls, Fat and Thin and Veronica, as well as the story collections Bad Behavior, Because They Wanted To, and Don't Cry. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Granta, Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. Last year she was a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library where she was researching a novel.
"Now Ginger was not Ginger. She was starved hurting limbs. She was a dried sore mouth and eyes. She was a straining heart. She was legs that stumbled as they were pulled forward by the mass of driven bodies."
In his editor's note, founding editor of Electric Liteature Andy Hunter compares his two favorite authors of short "Like Flannery O'Connor, Ms. Gaitskill has an unsparing intuition for people’s weaknesses and motives, and she creates exquisitely drawn characters living in a ragged world where things matter."
Great authors inspire us. But what about the stories that inspire them? Recommended Reading, the latest project from Electric Literature, publishes one story every week, each chosen by a great author or editor. In this age of distraction, we uncover writing that's worth slowing down and spending some time with. And in doing so, we help give great writers, literary magazines, and independent presses the recognition (and readership) they deserve.
Mary Gaitskill is the author of the novels Two Girls, Fat and Thin and Veronica, as well as the story collections Bad Behavior, Because They Wanted To, and Don't Cry. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Granta, Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. Last year she was a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library where she was researching a novel.
- GenresShort StoriesFiction
16 pages, Kindle Edition
First published July 16, 2012
3 people are currently reading
231 people want to read
About the author
Mary Gaitskill
70 books1,500 followersMary Gaitskill is an American author of essays, short stories and novels. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories (1993 and 2006), and The O. Henry Prize Stories (1998). She married writer Peter Trachtenberg in 2001. As of 2005, she lived in New York City; Gaitskill has previously lived in Toronto, San Francisco, and Marin County, CA, as well as attending the University of Michigan where she earned her B.A. and won a Hopwood Award. Gaitskill has recounted (in her essay "Revelation") becoming a born-again Christian at age 21 but lapsing after six months.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 16, 2024
mary gaitskill you will always be famous…excerpts from the mare probably take up too much of this book but i LOVE the idea of teasing out what’s autobiography in the fiction an author writes. her empathy and kindness are astounding
July 8, 2023
No no no I didn’t read this in one day. I just started reading it and oh jeez this is the second time i touched the wrong thing and I made it APPEAR that I read the book. I’ll write a proper review when I finish.
September 23, 2024
- Falsely advertised as a “collection of stories and dreams”, this is a poor excuse for a book.
- The only story I enjoyed was the shortest out of the entire book, *Gattito*, about her rescue of a small cat in Italy, and the parallel with some children she took care of as part of a summer program for underserved communities. That latter piece is further explored in *The Mare*, which I would probably have enjoyed as a standalone book, without the surrounding noise.
- The most annoying part of the novel was Gaitskill’s intermittent interjections to explain why she did this or that, or respond to a literary critique’s jab about her writing (i.e., Anne Carson in *On Cruelty* writing about Gaitksill’s obsession with it).
- The writing and the plot in *Veronica* were my least favorite, boring and hard to follow, and over-jammed with analogies.
- The only story I enjoyed was the shortest out of the entire book, *Gattito*, about her rescue of a small cat in Italy, and the parallel with some children she took care of as part of a summer program for underserved communities. That latter piece is further explored in *The Mare*, which I would probably have enjoyed as a standalone book, without the surrounding noise.
- The most annoying part of the novel was Gaitskill’s intermittent interjections to explain why she did this or that, or respond to a literary critique’s jab about her writing (i.e., Anne Carson in *On Cruelty* writing about Gaitksill’s obsession with it).
- The writing and the plot in *Veronica* were my least favorite, boring and hard to follow, and over-jammed with analogies.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews