Pure Hollywood

Book excerpt: “Long and short stories from one of our most distinctive prose stylists,” the author of the National Book Award finalist, Florida: A Novel (New York, “The Best Books of the Year So Far”). Hailed by George Saunders as “a truly gifted writer,” with Pure Hollywood & Other Stories, Pulitzer Prize finalist and O Henry Prize winner Christine Schutt returns to the short story form that launched her acclaimed career and her inimitable style that John Ashbery once described as “pared down but rich, dense, fevered, exactly right and even eerily beautiful.” In 11 captivating tales, 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, a newlywed couple who ignore the violent warnings of a painter burned by love, to an eerie portrait of erotic obsession, each story in Pure Hollywood is an imagistic snapshot of what it means to live and learn love and hurt. In league with JD Salinger, Katherine Mansfield and Guy De Maupassant, in Pure Hollywood 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. “Schutt’s haunting yet lyrical words linger long after the final page.”—Los Angeles Times “Think Gatsby with a twist of Didion.”—BBC.com “Schutt writes stories that don’t have an ounce of melodrama in them—they feel unusually alive and honest—and few writers capture bereavement with Schutt’s precision and elegance.”—Oprah.com