Pure Hollywood: And Other Stories

Hailed by George Saunders as “a truly gifted writer,” with Pure Hollywood, Pulitzer Prize finalist and O. Henry Prize winner Christine Schutt returns to the short-story form that launched her acclaimed career and her inimitable style John Ashbery once described as “pared down but rich, dense, fevered, exactly right and even eerily beautiful.”

 

In eleven captivating tales, Pure Hollywood brings us into private worlds of corrupt familial love, intimacy, longing, and danger. From an alcoholic widowed actress living in desert seclusion to a young mother whose rejection of her child has terrible consequences, a newlywed couple who ignore the violent warnings of a painter burned by love to an eerie portrait of erotic obsession, each story in Pure Hollywood is an imagistic snapshot of what it means to live and learn, love and hurt.

 

In league with short-story virtuosos J.D. Salinger, Katherine Mansfield, and Guy de Maupassant, Schutt gives us sharply suspenseful and masterfully dark interior portraits of ordinary lives, infused with her signature observation and surprise. Timeless, incisive, and precise, these tales are a rush of blood to the head, portals through which we open our eyes and see the world anew.

 

“Don’t be fooled by its size. This book is a masterwork that hits way harder than its weight class, and achieves what great fiction always achieves—it commands us to be aware.”—Matt Sumell, author of Making Nice