Pure Hollywood

Description

With Pure Hollywood, Pulitzer Prize-finalist Christine Schutt returns to the short story form that launched her acclaimed career. In tales of rare wit, Pure Hollywood brings us into private worlds of longing and danger. An alcoholic actress takes her children to live in 'a rusted box on stilts' in the desert. In an exclusive island resort, a young family's holiday has terrible consequences. A newly-wed couple who, while still 'newly everything', fall in with a misanthropic painter burned by love. 'On the beach, they agreed, their daydreaming was sometimes dangerous.' Schutt's sharply suspenseful and masterfully dark interior portraits of ordinary lives are shot through with surprise and, as Ottessa Moshfegh has it, 'exquisitely weird writing'.

Awards

Short-listed for Pulitzer Prize in Fiction 2009.

Reviews

`A truly gifted writer.' George Saunders ---------- `Pared down but rich, dense, fevered, exactly right and eerily beautiful' John Ashbery ---------- `Pure Hollywood is pure gold. In tales of rare wit and verve, Christine Schutt leads us into the lives of her perfectly drawn characters - couples young and old, children, skinny men, charming women - and dances on masterful prose through gardens, alcohol (often too much), luxurious homes, and resort vacation spots. Come for the art of her exquisitely weird writing and stay for the human drama.' Ottesa Moshfegh ---------- `Christine Schutt is already easily among the liveliest stylists of our time, and these eleven stories prove we ain't seen nothing yet. Each is a wonder, pickled in her crystalline idiom and cured under her brutal, astonishing wit.'-Claire Vaye Watkins ---------- `With terse sentences that read like poetry, Schutt strips each scene of excess context and cuts to the heart of the moment . . . Schutt's haunting yet lyrical words linger long after the final page.' Los Angeles Times ---------- `Shot through with Woolf's lyrical, restless spirit.' New York Times Book Review ---------- `Her sentences never waste a phrase or even a word.' Washington Post

Author description

Christine Schutt is the author of two short story collections and three novels. She has been a finalist for both the National Book Award (Florida) and Pulitzer Prize (All Souls). Among other honors, Schutt has twice won the O. Henry Short Story Prize. She is the recipient of the New York Foundation of the Arts and Guggenheim Fellowships. Schutt lives and teaches in New York.