Pure Hollywood: And Other Stories - Softcover

Schutt, Christine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802129226 ISBN 13: 9780802129222

Publisher: Grove Press, 2019

Synopsis

“Pure Hollywood is pure gold.”―Ottessa Moshfegh

The sensational new story collection from one of our sharpest, most original, and daringly cinematic stylists, National Book Award finalist and O Henry Prize winner Christine Schutt.

In one eponymous novella and ten stories, Pure Hollywood brings us into private worlds of corrupt familial love, intimacy, longing, and danger. From an alcoholic widowed actress living in desert seclusion to a young mother whose rejection of her child has terrible consequences, from a newlywed couple who ignore the violent warnings of a painter burned by love to an eerie portrait of erotic obsession, each story is an imagistic snapshot of what it means to live and learn, love and hurt. 

With Pure Hollywood Christine Schutt gives us sharply suspenseful and masterfully dark interior portraits of ordinary lives, infused with her signature observation and surprise. Timeless, incisive, and precise, these tales are a rush of blood to the head, portals through which we open our eyes and see the world anew.   

About this title

About the Author:

CHRISTINE SCHUTT is the author of two collections of stories, Nightwork and A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer. She is also the author of the novels Prosperous Friends, Florida, a National Book Award finalist, and All Souls, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

The late afternoon sky he saw was the same Mimi saw leeched of all its color. Mimi, with her eyes stung from the smoke or crying or both, drew the drapes and turned on a downstairs light, a small flame in the gloom of the mostly bare and sunken living room. The Eames chair―her husband's―startled her: where had it been that she had not seen it? Then her lawyer, good on his word, called, and she learned what she already knew: nothing was hers.
Briefly sober, she called Stetson’s cell to say she wasn’t going to drink anymore and she wished he would come back. She didn’t like to be alone in the house. “I want to get better. I want to get over this. I wish you’d pick up,” she said, then blipped off hurt to think he hadn’t even answered a call with her name She fixed herself more of the same and lowered the blinds in the kitchen and in the dining room to spy on the gardener as he moved around the house. His expression was hard to make out, but she watched him wrestle the hose into a terra cotta pot; the hose must have weighed more than he did, poor man. When she thought he might come to the front door, Mimi took off her mules and crept through the house up the floating staircase to what she had made into her bedroom where she hid between the bed and the wall.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0802129226
• ISBN 13: 9780802129222
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144