Photo credit: Joe Gaffney

Set in Paris, California, and Manhattan, an often harsh but ultimately thrilling chronicle of a young woman’s coming-of-age and the memories of her friendship with an eccentric older woman.

Mary Gaitskill is the author of Bad Behavior, a collection of short stories, and Two Girls, Fat and Thin, a novel. Her previous book was Because They Wanted To, which was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1998. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories (1993) and The O.Henry Prize Stories (1998). The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she teaches creative writing at Syracuse University.

Judges’ Citation

Mary Gaitskill is an unforgiving writer, harsh, caustic and raw. All that masks the enormous accomplishment of her work, the ability to use the dark to cast light. With Veronica she is at the height of her narrative powers, evoking the indelible friendship of two women while zigzagging through time, place and the far reaches of the mind. In the process she manages the ultimate hat trick of fiction: appalling, shocking, even offensive, but at the end of the day enormously illuminating. An utterly honest book from someone who understands and evokes the cul-de-sacs of the soul.