This is Pleasure

Reviews / Votes

I really admire how Mary Gaitskill is willing to think about the problematic with complexity and humanity, and without taking sides or engaging in all the fashionable moral hectoring that passes for serious thought these days. This is Pleasure is a breath of intellectual fresh air and badly needed. -- Eimear McBride At the heart of this extraordinary, daring, provocative, pitch perfect story lies the idea that, sometimes, we act out a truth, only to run from it. -- Rachel Cooke * The Observer * Mary Gaitskill is just the person to take on the task of questioning #MeToo's harasser vs. victim scenarios in a fictional context ... Whether you agree or disagree, it is time to have these conversations ... Give This is Pleasure to someone you want to talk to. * Washington Post * Gaitskill is enormously gifted * The New York Times Book Review * Gaitskill's willingness to ignore common wisdom and consider controversial and complex questions from different viewpoints is a true literary pleasure * Kirkus starred review * Gaitskill's work feels more real than real life and reading her leads to a place that feels like a sacred space * The Boston Globe * The range of Gaitskill's humanity is astonishing * LA Times * Gaitskill is at the height of her powers in this novella. The empathy we feel for her characters is not despite, but because of, the fierce clarity of her prose. -- Colin Barrett, author of Young Skins In fewer than 100 pages, Gaitskill achieves a superb feat. She distils the suffering, anger, reactivity, danger and social recalibration of the #MeToo movement into an extremely potent, intelligent and nuanced account. This Is Pleasure sensitively and confidently holds its fury, momentum, contrary forces and imperfect humanity within a perfect frame. -- Sarah Hall * The Guardian * The work of an expert iconoclast * Metro * This Is Pleasure is a little novella that gets deep under your skin. At 96 pages, it is an exquisitely compressed, morally tangly saga about a charming, middle-aged book publisher who is accused of workplace harassment. Gaitskill writes in clean, rigorous prose but builds in tripwires that keep the reader guessing where her sympathies might lie. -- Johanna Thomas-Corr * The Sunday Times * This is Pleasure is set in an eerie borderland between pleasure and pain, intimacy and exploitation, a truth and a lie. And it is testament to Gaitskill that through her stories we can hope to understand one another. This, it would seem, is the one true pleasure. -- Isobel Shirlaw * iNews * A tale for our time, if ever there was one. -- Katy Thompsett * Refinery 29 * A reminder that fiction is an ideal space for exploring the grey areas that vanish in the online glare -- Rob Doyle * Independent * Gaitskill is the laureate of murky questions of power and consent. This novella about a chronic flirt in his 60s is a nuanced riff on "he said/ she said" * Daily Telegraph *