Mary Gaitskill returns with a luminous new collection of stories—her first in more than ten years.

In “College Town 1980,” young people adrift in Ann Arbor, Michigan, debate the meaning of personal strength at the start of the Reagan era; in the urban fairy tale “Mirror Ball,” a young man steals a girl’s soul during a one-night stand; and in “The Little Boy,” a woman haunted by the death of her 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.