Mary Gaitskill, this year’s Fisher Family Writer-in-Residence, will read from her work on Wednesday, February 21, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium at 7:30 pm. 

Gaitskill is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. She is the author of seven books of prose including Bad Behavior (1988), a collection of short stories dealing with a variety of taboo subjects; her most recent collection of personal essays written over the last two decades, Somebody with a Little Hammer (2017), covers topics from literature and politics to date-rape.

Gaitskill is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship; she was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award, National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle. Her story “Secretary” was the basis for the feature film of the same name starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader. She has taught at U-C Berkeley, the University of Houston, New York University, Brown, and Syracuse University.

Of her most recent novel, The Mare (2015), New York Times journalist Parul Sehgal writes, “[Gaitskill]—known for depicting violent sex and lonely people—delves into the most frightening subject of all: real connection…What makes her exciting is her ability to evoke the hidden life, the life unseen, the life we don’t even know we are living.” Alex Clark of The Guardian calls it “bold, dramatic and deeply unsettling,” noting that “The Mare explores inadequacy, optimism, craziness—and sets them in the context of love, and of need.”

The Fisher Family Writer-in-Residence is sponsored by Steven Fisher ’70, The Joseph L. Grucci Poetry Endowment, University Libraries, the Department of English, and the College of Liberal Arts. The reading is free and open to the public.

Author photo: © Derek Shapton