My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up — Stephen Elliott

This blistering new collection from literary rising star Stephen Elliott demonstrates once again why his books have been praised as �"graceful,” �"soaring,” and �"fearless.” As with all of Elliott's work, these stories have the raw ring of truth filtered through the author's downbeat-poetic sensibility. My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up follows the narrator on a dizzying ride through past and present, from a group home for troubled adolescents in Chicago where he loses his virginity to shooting galleries and homeless encampments in San Francisco where he searches for deeper and darker thrills. In �"Other Desires,” a flood of unsettling memories backgrounds the narrator's involvement with a loose-knit family of lost souls. �"Tears” explores the disturbing complexities of an S/M Internet hook-up. Several of the stories feature the enigmatic Eden, the narrator's polyamorous mistress. With My Girlfriend, Elliott confirms his status as a major young writer of a kind of literary fiction that recalls the work of Genet and Bukowski.