Don't Cry is Mary Gaitskill's first collection of stories in over ten years, following the tremendous success of her previous collections, Bad Behaviour and Because They Wanted To.



'An Old Virgin' describes a nurse's obsession with her forty-three-year-old patient's virginity; in the urban fable 'Mirrorball' a man steals a girl's soul during a one-night stand; 'College Town 1980' follows a group of listless young people adrift in Ann Arbor, debating the meaning of personal strength at the start of the Reagan era; 'Folk Song' opens with a list of newspaper headlines before dissecting the lives of the characters behind the features, including a murderer who gives a prime-time interview and a woman from San Francisco attempting to break a world record by having sex with one thousand men. Full of jagged, lived emotion, broken people and powerful, original writing, Don't Cry is a testament to Gaitskill's formal range and incomparable excavation of character.