The Devil's Treasure

“Gaitskill is an era-defining talent, one of the best American fiction writers working today, and the book is a collage of fiction, autobiography, and fairy tale that seeks, through ‘ordered disorder,’ to approach a fundamental thing about making art.” —Valerie Stivers, Compact Magazine

A bewitching collage of fiction, memoir, and mythography from the author unique in her “ability to evoke the hidden life, the life unseen, the life we don’t even know we are living.” (Parul Sehgal, The New York Times Magazine)

In this searching biography of the writer’s imagination, Mary Gaitskill excavates her own novels, revealing their origins and obsessions, the personal and societal pressures that formed them, and the life story hidden between their pages. Using the techniques of collage, The Devil's Treasure splices fiction together with commentary and personal history, and with the fairy tale that gives the book its title, about a little girl who ventures into Hell through a suburban trapdoor.

The result is the best book we have about contemporary fiction, the forces ranged against it, and the forces that bring it into being. “Even among other artists attracted to weakness as a theme, [Gaitskill] is rare in being able to look at it on its own terms. She doesn’t treat it like a curiosity, like Diane Arbus, or a chink in the armor that might let in faith, like Flannery O’Connor . . . She looks—just looks—and sees everything.” —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times Magazine