The Devil's Treasure

A bewitching collage of fiction, memoir, essay, criticism, and visual art from an author unique in her “ability to evoke the hidden life, the life unseen, the life we don’t even know we are living.” (Parul Seghal, New York Times Magazine) In The Devil's Treasure—aptly subtitled A Book of Stories and Dreams—the iconic author Mary Gaitskill has created a chimerical hybrid of fiction, memoir, essay, criticism, and visual art that transcends categorization. This collage of four novels (one a work in progress), interspersed and thematically linked by a single short story, then woven together with the author's commentary, is a kind of director's cut revealing the personal and societal forces that went into each individual piece of work, an ongoing, passionate exploration of core human emotions and experience—the ideally, sometimes quixotically high, and the grossly, confusedly low. With the stylistic daring and preternatural acuity that has made her one of America's most original writers, Gaitskill has created a layered vision of modern life that simultaneously blends the huge prehistoric creatures that swim at the bottom of our collective ocean with the family that picnics on the beach while the podcast natters about politics and a perhaps dangerously curious child explores the lapping waves.