Somebody with a Little Hammer: Essays

She shows us the transcendentalism of the Talking Heads, the melancholy of Björk, the playfulness of artist Laurel Nakadate. She celebrates the clownish grandiosity & the poetry of Norman Mailer’s long career & maps the sociosexual cataclysm embodied by porn star Linda Lovelace. And in the deceptively titled “Lost Cat,” she explores how the most intimate relationships may be warped by power & race. 

Witty, tender, beautiful, & unsettling, Somebody with a Little Hammer displays the same heat-seeking, revelatory understanding for which we value Gaitskill’s fiction.

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Mary Gaitskill is the author of Bad Behavior; Two Girls, Fat & Thin; Because They Wanted To; Veronica; Don’t Cry; The Mare; Somebody with a Little Hammer; & This is Pleasure.