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MONMOUTH UNIVERSITY’S VISITING WRITERS SERIES PRESENTS MARY GAITSKILL

The 2013 Visiting Writers Series continues with a reading by award-winning author Mary Gaitskill on Tuesday, March 12 at 4:30 p.m. in Wilson Hall Auditorium on Monmouth University’s campus.

In a conversation with BOMB Magazine, novelist and story writer Mary Gaitskill said she chose to become a writer at age 18 because she was “indignant about things-it was the typical teenage sense of ‘things are wrong in the world and I must say something.” Her first collection of stories, Bad Behavior, now a classic, made critical waves when it was first published, heralding Gaitskill’s arrival on the literary scene and established her as one of the sharpest, erotically charged, and audaciously funny writing talents of contemporary literature. One of the stories in this collection, “Secretary” was the basis for a 2002 feature film of the same name starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader. The film received the Special Jury Prize, and was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.

Her other works include:Because They Wanted To, a collection of stories nominated for the PEN/Faulkner in 1998, and the novels Two Girls, Fat and Thin, and Veronica, which was nominated for the 2005 National Book Award, National Critic’s Circle Award, and LA Times Book Award. Her 2009 collection of stories is titled Don’t Cry: “Written with her distinctive, uncanny combination of bluntness and high lyricism, Don’t Cry takes its place among artworks of great moral seriousness” (BOMB Magazine).

The Village Voice praises that “There may be no better writer than Gaitskill at reaching deep into what she calls…’the trapdoors in personality and obsession,’ and pulling what she finds there back out into the world. Past, present, future; heartbreak, desire, and loss-none of it is quite beyond her.” Gaitskill’s stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. In 2002 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction, and in 2010 was awarded a Cullman Research Fellowship at the New York Public Library.

Monmouth University’s Center for the Arts Visiting Writers Series brings the most celebrated poets and authors from around the world (Andrei Codrescu, Colm Tóibín, Adam Zagajewski,) and our own back yard (Long Branch’s own US Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky) to the beautiful auditorium of the University’s centerpiece, historic Wilson Hall. For additional information, please contact the director of the Visiting Writers Series, Michael Thomas at 732-263-5635 or visit online at www.monmouth.edu/arts/.