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Secretary

By Mary Gaitskill
Penguin Classics
Series: Penguin Archive
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Brief Description
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books A writer engulfed by a new obsession, an occasional sex-worker, a runaway, and a teenager entering the workplace—these four tales of desire and dislocation explore the rough edges of relationships and the inner lives of women negotiating... Read More
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90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books

A writer engulfed by a new obsession, an occasional sex-worker, a runaway, and a teenager entering the workplace—these four tales of desire and dislocation explore the rough edges of relationships and the inner lives of women negotiating their precarious place in the world.

In these coolly compelling and quietly devastating stories, Gaitskill evokes with razor-sharp precision the pleasure, pain, fear, and longing that haunt modern life.

Series: Penguin Archive

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Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9780241752210

Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 17 April 2025

Country: United Kingdom

Imprint: Penguin Classics

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 9.0mm

Width: 112.0mm

Height: 182.0mm

Weight: 90g

Pages: 144

Collections

Classic Fiction Classic General Fiction Fiction General Fiction Literary Fiction Mary Gaitskill Penguin Books Penguin Classics Penguin Classics: General Fiction Series: Penguin Archive

About the Author

Mary Gaitskill is the author of the story collections Bad Behavior, Because They Wanted To (nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award), and Don't Cry, the novels The Mare, Veronica (nominated for the National Book Award), Two Girls, Fat and Thin, and a collection of essays, Somebody with A Little Hammer. Her stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's, Artforum, and Granta, among many other journals, as well as in The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories.

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  • Bad Behavior
    The bestselling 1988 collection of short stories exploring the inner lives of men and women, ambiguity and unease in relationships, and the cruelty we inflict on one another. A young woman anxiously waits for her date on a street corner in New York City; he sits in a pizza parlour across the street, watching her discomfort. A middle-aged woman returns...
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  • Because They Wanted To
    A bestselling collection of short stories from the American master storyteller Mary Gaitskill, author of Bad Behavior. First published in the late 1990s and a bestseller at the time, this incisive collection of short stories explores connection and disconnection in families, between ex-lovers and friends. From a father reflecting on the daughter whose lesbianism he cannot accept, to two people...
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  • Lost Cat
    So begins Mary Gaitskill's stunning long essay, the closest thing she has written to a memoir, about a lost cat and a pair of adopted children. In this searing piece about loss, love, safety and fear, Gaitskill applies her razor-sharp writing to her most personal subjects yet.
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  • This is Pleasure
    'Gets deep under your skin ... Gaitskill is uniquely attuned to the moment.' - Sunday Times 'Gaitskill achieves a superb feat. She distils the suffering, anger, reactivity, danger and social recalibration of the #MeToo movement into an extremely potent, intelligent and nuanced account.' - Sarah Hall, Guardian 'I don't know why I behaved the way I did, and I kept...
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  • Two Girls, Fat and Thin
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  • Oppositions
    ‘Mary Gaitskill is willing to think about the problematic with complexity and humanity, and without taking sides or engaging in all the fashionable moral hectoring that passes for serious thought these days.’ - Eimear McBride Nuanced, daring and tender, these essays from the celebrated author of This is Pleasure and Bad Behavior, consistently fascinate and provoke. Mary Gaitskill takes on...
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  • Veronica
    In this seductive and shattering novel, Alison and Veronica meet amid the nocturnal glamour of 1980s New York: one is a former modelling sensation, stumbling away from the wreck of her career, the other an eccentric middle-aged proofreader with a meticulous eye. Over the next twenty years, their friendship will encompass narcissism and tenderness, exploitation and self-sacrifice, love and mortality....
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