Pure Hollywood: And Other Stories

by Christine Schutt

Overview

“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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802129222
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	02/19/2019
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.10(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

"It doesn't matter what anyone says. If the work is good, eventually it will be found," National Book Award finalist Christine Schutt told The New York Times Magazine. "I used to imagine that my work would be discovered after I am dead, but it's much nicer to be recognized in one's lifetime."

Place of Birth:

Watertown, Wisconsin

Education:

B.A., M.A., University of Wisconsin; M.F.A., Columbia University

Website:

http://christineschutt.com/

Read an Excerpt

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.

Editorial Reviews

Fans of Schutt…expect to be thrown off balance and relish the sensation. Indeed, this collection of 11 stories, stretched on a taut diagonal between Maine and Los Angeles, nimbly kicks us sideways at every turn. Schutt's stories—awash in money, lush foliage and coyly named houses—menace and sometimes subsume their desperate characters…Schutt's offbeat and dissonant sentences make us experience language anew…The stories are full of trapdoors, but Schutt's craft is seamless.

The New York Times Book Review - Julie Orringer

01/08/2018
Nobody writes like Schutt, the National Book Award–finalist author of Florida, and her latest collection is the perfect entry point for readers new to her work. In the title novella, an alcoholic, recently widowed actress leaves her sprawling estate to face violence and oblivion in the desert. “The Hedges” and “A Happy Rural Seat of Various View: Lucinda’s Garden” both feature self-absorbed young couples carelessly risking horrific tragedy. Troubled adults sit in gardens, resigned to their fates, in both “Species of Special Concern” and “The Duchess of Albany.” In each of the collection’s 11 stories, Schutt gives readers dissipated women staggering to the brink of sanity, desperate men with foggy intentions, and an eerie atmosphere that radiates menace, sexuality, and murder. But Schutt’s prose is the main attraction: an aged father is “masseused and smooth as a skinned almond,” the pleasures of gardening are described in terms of routine (“they watered the deep beds; they flourished arcs; they beaded hooded plants and frangible rues”), and an ominous stranger is said to have a “seer voice, the old, pocked, vacant voice, prophesying horrors they could not imagine.” Schutt is always in control in this work by an experimental American writer of unparalleled style. Agent: Gail Hochman, Brandt & Hochman Literary. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Pure Hollywood

"Think Gatsby with a twist of Didion."—BBC.com

"A book of long and short stories from one of our most distinctive prose stylists, Pure Hollywood captures several recognizable sorts of American landscapes and renders them and the people who wander through them in entirely new light."—New York, "The Best Books of the Year So Far"

“Wherever your literary comfort zone is, the chances are that Christine Schutt is outside it…The stories in this collection evade easy capture – but in reading, isn’t the pursuit part of the pleasure?”—The Guardian

“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

“A wisp of a book, as rich as it is thin...[Schutt] might well be called a story whisperer. She casts startling, jagged turns of phrase and coaxes stories from an accumulation of details. A sense of menace permeates this book, as accidents, misfortune and death amass from one story to the next. Yet even the darkest themes are rarely weighty with prose so nimble and offhand glints of humor. While Schutt is known as a stylist, she’s also a purveyor of suspense this time around. The result is that these moody, often prickly, stories can veer into unexpected territory, keeping us on our toes.”—Joan Silverman, Portland Press Herald

“In this book, perhaps the best of her career, she has drawn together her various talents and methodologies into something singular.” –3am Magazine

“Schutt's distinct and economic style is on full display throughout this slim collection...Schutt offers surprising reminders of the ghastly and gruesome that are never too far away...Intimate portrayals of darkness told in Schutt's tight and affecting prose.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Nobody writes like Schutt, the National Book Award–finalist author of Florida, and her latest collection is the perfect entry point for readers new to her work. ...Schutt is always in control in this work by an experimental American writer of unparalleled style."—Publishers Weekly

“Schutt’s short stories portray flawed characters wrestling with resentment, loneliness, and mortality. …Schutt’s restrained, provoking tales hold detailed impressions at arm’s length, as it were, leaving readers to explore life’s uneasy truths viewed through an unrelenting lens.”—Booklist

“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, author of Gold Fame Citrus

“In Pure Hollywood, the genius of Christine Schutt’s prose is as mysterious and undeniable as ever, its brilliance all the more remarkable for the darkness it explores, the disturbing realities it illuminates. Her soul-sick characters stalk and haunt your heart every bit as much as Flannery O’Connor’s. But even as she unnerves us, Schutt’s fiction renders more light, more life, more beauty. Don’t be fooled by its size. This book is a masterwork that hits way harder than its weight class, and achieves what great fiction always achieves—it commands us to be aware.”—Matt Sumell, author of Making Nice

“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. I loved each story—the quick flashes as well as the longer stories. Each one damaged my composure as a reader and fascinated me as a writer. Bravo!”—Ottessa Moshfegh, author of Eileen and Homesick for Another World

Praise for Christine Schutt

“A truly gifted writer.”—George Saunders

“Schutt demands our meditation, our intimate consideration, our awe.”—Jayne Anne Phillips

“Among the best writers of our time.” —Kate Walbert

From the Publisher

★ 2017-12-24
Ten stories and a novella that give us oblique glimpses of tragedy.Schutt's (Prosperous Friends, 2012, etc.) distinct and economic style is on full display throughout this slim collection. She makes use of parentheticals frequently. In "The Duchess of Albany," the main character recalls her late husband's old age in an off-camera, single-sentence scene: "(Owen at the long table, saying to the ringing phone, ‘Go away, people. Leave us alone,' and people pretty much did)." Schutt offers surprising reminders of the ghastly and gruesome that are never too far away. The second and penultimate stories, "The Hedges" and "Oh, the Obvious," feature accidents that occur on vacations. In each, the narrative perspective makes the reader essentially a bystander witnessing terrible, even fatal, events that befall a stranger. In "Where You Live, When You Need Me?" a mother recounts the summer when Ella, a much-needed babysitter, appeared out of nowhere. "Everyone shared Ella. She had work every day if she wanted." Nobody ever even knew Ella's last name, and this was no innocent time of naiveté. Indeed, this was 1984, "the summer when little parts of little bodies turned up in KFC buckets in Dumpsters in the city." The title piece, the novella, layers the tragedy. We open on a California wildfire and then meet Mimi, a young, recent widow of a famous comedian who was four decades her senior. We see Mimi relive her own troubled childhood before she becomes an unintentional witness to another family's tragedy. Through this, the novella—like the collection—maintains a dark wit that keeps it buoyant. In a tense conversation with her late husband's son, Mimi is asked, "What did you and my dad ever have in common?" She answers with the perfect punch line, "He didn't really like his kids and neither do I."Intimate portrayals of darkness told in Schutt's tight and affecting prose.

Kirkus Review