The Devil’s Treasures: A Book of Stories and Dreams

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Join us on Tuesday, November 2nd at 6pm PT when Mary Gaitskill discusses her latest book, The Devil’s Treasures: A Book of Stories and Dreams, with Greil Marcus at 9th Ave!

Masks Required for In-Store Attendance

Join us virtually by registering at the link below
https://us02web.zoom.us/…/reg…/WN_yUxMVkonTWy3M-uXpkI3DA

Praise for The Devil’s Treasure

“What is most amazing about Gaitskill is her ability to portray the heart of human longing and suffering, and to see in each gesture of our lives the disturbing and conflicting pool of drives that marks our every gesture.” – Sheila Heti, The Believer

“Devotees of Gaitskill’s work are likely to appreciate the opportunity to revisit her masterworks on something of a guided tour where the author herself is able to instruct us… This impressionistic construction rewards those looking for a deeper connection to Gaitskill’s rigorous imagination.” – Kirkus Review

“Gaitskill is something special. She doesn’t grandstand; she lacks self-pity. She has an intuitive sympathy for people acting on their worst impulses and a gift for portraying cruelty without condemnation. She manages to be an erotic writer without being, precisely, a sex writer.” – Emily Nussbaum, New York Magazine

About The Devil’s Treasure

“What is in the bag behind the Devil’s chair? Knowledge of some kind? Surely something a little girl did not know should be left alone. I’ve been criticized— and sometimes admired—for what some readers see as my affinity with cruelty, both in my depictions of it and my supposed infliction of it on characters.”

In The Devil’s Treasure—aptly subtitled A Book of Stories and Dreams—the iconic author Mary Gaitskill has created a chimerical hybrid of fiction, memoir, essay, criticism, and visual art that transcends categorization. This collage of four novels (one a work in progress), interspersed with and thematically linked by a single short story, then woven together with the author’s commentary, is a kind of director’s cut revealing the personal and societal forces that inform each individual piece of work, an ongoing, passionate exploration of core human emotions and experience, the ideally, sometimes quixotically high and grossly, confusedly low. With the stylistic daring and preternatural acuity that has made her one of America’s most original writers, Gaitskill has created a layered vision of modern life that simultaneously blends the huge prehistoric creatures that swim at the bottom of our collective ocean with a family that picnics on the beach while a podcast natters about politics and a perhaps dangerously curious child explores the lapping waves.

About Mary Gaitskill

Mary Gaitskill is a novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories.

About Greil Marcus

Greil Marcus was born in San Francisco in 1945. He started writing for Rolling Stone, in 1968, and currently writes for the Los Angeles Review of Books, where his column Real Life Rock Top 10 appears monthly. He is the author of “Mystery Train” (1975), “Lipstck Traces” (1989), “Invisible Republic” aka “The Old Weird America” (1997/2011), “Double Trouble” (2000), “The Shape of Things to Come” (2006), “The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs” (2014), and most recently “Under the Red White and Blue: Patriotism, Disenchantment and the Stubborn Myth of The Great Gatsby” (2020). With Werner Sollors he is the editor of “A New Literary History of America’ (2009). He lives in Oakland.

Disclaimer: Please double check event information with the event organizer as events can be canceled, details can change after they are added to our calendar, and errors do occur.