Siri is a legacy admission, rich and spoiled and destined to flunk out of her freshman year at college. Esther, her roommate, is a scholarship student from humble means, brilliant and driven to succeed. Brought together by chance, the girls soon become partners in a struggle to find their way in a world where neither Esther’s brains nor Siri’s beauty is enough. Never having been forced to work hard at anything, Siri must rely on Esther to teach her to learn and attend class. But as Siri wakes from her dream world to discover the life of the mind, Esther begins shedding her rational bonds to explore the mysteries of the soul. For both, some of the most devastating lessons in the attainment of worldly knowledge come from love. Deadpan funny and bittersweet, A Bad and Stupid Girl is above all else a moving portrait of two friends helping each other to uncover the potential splendor of their lives. Jean McGarry is the author of six previous books of fiction: Airs of Providence, The Very Rich Hours, The Courage of Girls, Home at Last, Gallagher's Travels, and Dream Date. She is a professor of fiction at The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. A Bad and Stupid Girl is her third novel.   “Jean McGarry's novel is a lovely locket of a book, with the picture inside not at all faded. Focused in close-up, succinct and convincing, it's a story about friendship and maturation, and about how our studies, alone, do not define us.”―Ann Beattie “Jean McGarry’s A Bad and Stupid Girl is an uncommonly Good and Bright-Indeed Novel, sharply written from start to finish and entertaining as Hell.”―John Barth “Everything in life is arbitrary yet must be over-determined in literature. Jean McGarry knows how to tell a persuasive tale illuminating these truths.”―Harold Bloom  

A Bad and Stupid Girl (Michigan Literary Fiction Awards)

Literature & Fiction

McGarry, Jean

Literary

University of Michigan Press

The writer's fourth collection of stories explores, with a touch of surrealism, the unconscious desires or fears inherent in relationships
Jean McGarry has been praised for her "deft, comic, and devastatingly precise portraits" (New York Times Book Review) and as "a writer who honors the human condition" (Baltimore Sun). In her new collection of stories, Dream Date, she focuses her skills as a "gifted observer" (Publishers Weekly) on the delicate boundary that separates the real from the ethereal states we drift into and out of as we try to make sense of our relationships, romantic and otherwise, with the other sex. Funny and haunting in equal measure―and suffused with a hint of the surreal―McGarry's stories explore the confusions, contradictions, and calamities of the modern relationship: in "Paris," a woman tracks down her wayward husband in the City of Lights and ends up having a meeting of minds with his mistress that gives great satisfaction to both women; in "Moon, June," a woman stalks the wardrobe of a wealthy socialite in a consignment shop, opening up a world of polymorphous delight and fashion envy; and in "The Secret of His Sleep," a man wakes up after forty years to a reality that is at once strangely familiar and completely unexpected. In these wry fictions, real-world problems often have solutions fashioned with the stunning clarity and logic of a dream.

Dream Date: Stories (Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction)

Genre Fiction

Johns Hopkins University Press

The stories of Ocean State roll over the reader like a wave. Family pleasures, marriage, the essential moments and mysteries of a seemingly ordinary world that break into magical territory before we can brace ourselves―Jean McGarry puts us in life’s rough seas with what the New York Times has called a "deft, comic, and devastatingly precise" hand.

Ocean State (Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction)

United States

Loretta Costello St. Cyr doesn't want to kill time--she wants to save  it, observing, reflecting but otherwise expending minimal energy; that  McGarry ( The Very Rich Hours ) creates a lively novel around so quiet a  character is impressive. Loretta is married to the opinionated,  brilliant, difficult Daniel, who is working on his philosophy  dissertation. The story, set primarily in New York City's East and West  villages, picks up at different points during the 1970s and is  interspersed with Loretta's memories of her childhood. She spends her  days drawing, rereading an old recipe book and visiting with Margaret,  an artist who collects figurines and small statues as well as assorted  boyfriends. Unable to get over her depression following a miscarriage,  Loretta retreats to the suburban home of the aunt and uncle who raised  her after her alcoholic parents died in a car crash when she was nine.  Daniel, desperate and confused, waits for her return. McGarry's deftly  drawn characters--notably Loretta's mother, a drunk who hates housework  but has a special gift for ironing--give this poignant novel its  vibrancy.

Courage Of Girls (Rutgers Press Fiction)

Rutgers University Press

The Red Coat

Poetry

Flockophobic Pr Ltd

Human House

Blue Boy tells the story of an art historian with gargantuan ambition and hubris. A greedy tyrant, Gabriel Rhab regards most of the people around him, family and colleagues included, as existing to serve him, though, unfortunately, they have their own ambitions and appetites, which sometimes get in the way. Though a satire, the story offers both fun and empathy, as the intensely inward-gazing world of academic rivalry, the sadness of art history, the futility of theory, and the ludic aspects of domestic life are explored from various points of view with hard intelligence and psychological depth.

Blue Boy

Humor & Satire

Jackleg Press

A collection of fifteen stories, Jean McGarry’s No Harm Done, depicts family life at its worst, best, and funniest, as if the author had conjoined the lunacy of Cold Comfort Farm with the bitter grievances of Dubliners. As the author writes in “Strong Boy,” this might be “…because every family, rich or poor, is roughage.” The characters, gallant, goofy, gifted, and grim, include sickly mothers of a dozen children, boozy fathers with a gift of the gab, kids aspiring to be nuns and priests, or just to get out of town with a whole skin. A section is devoted to one marriage made in heaven: a Jewish psychoanalyst devoted to his ex-nun wife. Another set of stories reworks familiar fairy tales, setting them in the wild present. No Harm Done (whose title is Irish code for wishful thinking) concludes with a truce to the war between the sexes, and indeed a ‘solution’ to the tragicomedy that is marriage and family.

No Harm Done (American Literature)

Dalkey Archive Press

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