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“This Is Pleasure,” by Mary Gaitskill | The New Yorker

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Fiction by Mary Gaitskill: “At first, the suit was not against me but against the publishing house, and all she wanted was a payment, which the company was prepared to make—as long as she kept quiet about her complaints.”

Save this story Save this story M. I’d known Quin for maybe five years when he told me this story—really not even a story, more like an anecdote—about a woman he’d met on the street. Quin believed that he could perceive people’s most essential nature just by looking at them; he also believed that, in the same way, he could know what they most wanted to hear or, rather, what they would most respond to. He was a little conceited about these supposed special abilities, and that was how the story began. He saw a melancholy-looking woman, a “former beauty,” as he put it, walking by herself in Centr

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