My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up - Softcover

Elliott, Stephen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1573442550 ISBN 13: 9781573442558

Publisher: Cleis Press, 2006

Synopsis

This blistering new collection from literary rising star Stephen Elliott demonstrates once again why his books have been praised as graceful,” soaring,” and fearless.” As with all of Elliott’s work, these stories have the raw ring of truth filtered through the author’s downbeat-poetic sensibility. My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up follows the narrator on a dizzying ride through past and present, from a group home for troubled adolescents in Chicago where he loses his virginity to shooting galleries and homeless encampments in San Francisco where he searches for deeper and darker thrills. In Other Desires,” a flood of unsettling memories backgrounds the narrator’s involvement with a loose-knit family of lost souls. Tears” explores the disturbing complexities of an S/M Internet hook-up. Several of the stories feature the enigmatic Eden, the narrator’s polyamorous mistress. With My Girlfriend, Elliott confirms his status as a major young writer of a kind of literary fiction that recalls the work of Genet and Bukowski.

About this title

About the Author:

Stephen Elliott is the author of five books, including Happy Baby and A Life Without Consequences. He lives in San Francisco.

Review:

"An amazing and beautiful and powerful book.... I can't think of a more courageous writer than Stephen Elliott. At the center of these stories of his degradations is, I think, a rare kind of love. He is beaten until he weeps so that he can be held while he cries. But this book isn't all pathos and blood and sex -- it's also very funny. So Stephen Elliott can do it all -- he can freak you out and he can make you laugh. What more could you want from a writer?" --Jonathan Ames, author of Wake Up, Sir!

"Stephen Elliott describes the sexual and emotional terrain in a voice that is at once feral and sweet, straightforward and complicated, devastating and funny as hell." --San Francisco Bay Guardian

"Stephen Elliott knocks my fishnet stockings off." --Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler's Wife

"There's an emotional courage to these stories, and a sense of urgency, that are thrilling to encounter. Elliott writes as if his life depended on each sentence." --The Believer

"[A] profound, distilled work of art...drink it and be transformed." --Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

"[Elliott is] a master of muted prose.... He conveys unmet yearning with a poignancy that is universal." --San Francisco Chronicle

About this edition

• Publisher: Cleis Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1573442550
• ISBN 13: 9781573442558
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 168