Description

‘Gets deep under your skin … Gaitskill is uniquely attuned to the moment.’ Sunday Times

‘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.’ Sarah Hall, Guardian

‘I don’t know why I behaved the way I did, and I kept doing it; he kept doing it. And though I might once have easily brushed it away, suddenly I could not. Nor could I confront him. The conversation moved too quickly.’

This is Pleasure is an extraordinary work by one of the world’s finest writers, and achieves more in 15,000 words than most full-length novels. Following the unravelling of the life of a male publisher undone by allegations of sexual impropriety and harassment, and the female friend who tries to understand, and explain, his actions, it looks unflinchingly at our present moment and rejects moral certainties to show us that there are many sides to every story.

Mary Gaitskill has spent her whole career mining the complexity of human relationships on both an individual and societal scale with wisdom and grace. Here her insights are more piercing and timely than ever.

Publisher Review

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 *