DAVID GATES lives in Missoula, Montana, and Granville, New York. He teaches at the University of Montana and in the Bennington Writing Seminars, and was a writer and editor at Newsweek, where he specialized in music and books.
“Brutal, viciously intelligent, and full of reckless, difficult
love for its characters. These are gripping, sophisticated,
gasp-inducing stories.” —The New Yorker
“Knowing and frank stories. . . a smart book about smart,
articulate people who get in their own way again and again [with]
not a lazy phrase on view.” —The New York Times Book Review
“This is David Gates at his best. . . . It’s a book of fiction
about people you’ll never believe aren’t real.” —Time Out New
York
“This novella-plus-stories is by turns tragic and hilarious and has
a deadpan quality that makes me think of masters like Updike and
Cheever.” —Sara Nelson, Amazon
“Gates is a master of variation [and] how good this book is, how
craftily conversational the prose is, how often seemingly
tossed-off lines produce that coveted spine tingle.” —The
Minneapolis Star Tribune
“He’s really, really funny about failure. Nobody writes about
failure better than David Gates.” —Lorin Stein, NPR
“David Gates is a wonderful writer. The stories in A
Hand Reached down to Guide Me are fully
realized, entertaining, gripping, astute, painful, wise,
outrageous and funny—all at the same time.” —Geoff
Dyer
“Remarkable. . . Gates turns a clear yet compassionate eye on
a motley crew of characters who cheat, drink, snort, and lie their
way through the autumn of their lives [and] the result is a moving
account of flawed existence.” —The New Yorker
“Stories with crystalline urgency. . . Gates is one of the
writers keeping the classic American short story alive [and he]
gets his people right, both men and women. . . . His first
collection in fifteen years carries the weight of maturity; of
being more acquainted with the impulses and compromises one makes
over the course of a lifetime.” —Chronogram
“The collection is really good [but] I’m surprised more isn’t made
of his comic talents. There’s a caustic wit at work on nearly every
page; empathy and misanthropy match stride for stride in a way that
recalls Cheever at his best. In ‘Banishment’—a previously
unpublished novella about a spectacularly bad marriage—it sometimes
seems there’s an act of casual betrayal on every page, each
designed to puncture another set of social mores.” —The Paris
Review
“Gates [has] staked out a territory, the anxieties of a particular
corner of the middle class: artsy, at one time hip or (even
slightly) radical, aspirational [in] creativity or spirit. That
these aspirations have crumbled is part of the point, as his
characters reckon with the compromises, physical and emotional,
that living brings [as well as] the tension between the profane and
the sacred, between the height of our ambitions and the depths of
our desires. . . .These [stories] capture a floating
insubstantiality we can’t help but recognize because it also
belongs to us.” —The Los Angeles Times
“Malice and goodness duke it out in the dark hearts of David
Gates's characters. . . . [He] isn't one to pass judgments.
He just sends devastatingly original dispatches from the
heart of darkness. . . . It broadens the spectrum of truthfulness
and emotion for which he is known [and] captures both the
unfettered love and flashes of rage.” — Janet Maslin, The New York
Times
“Deliciously wicked... The naughty musings most of us choose to
ignore compel Gates’s characters to act. . . . These people mock
their demons and, when called to account, exhibit such complexity,
humor and intelligence that you'll savor every page.” —More
magazine
“Where has David Gates been all of my life? How is it that I’ve
missed a writer who transforms all our failures and foibles into
tales so gripping they read like great mystery novels? A Hand
Reached Down To Guide Me is as unflinching as fiction gets, one of
those books that feels like a discovery from the first page to the
last.” —Adam Ross
Acclaim from the U.K.
“The irreverent and confident prose of this American writer is
bewitching…Gates’s landscapes are deliciously detailed - you can
feel the sofa fabric, read the newspapers, smell the bourbon - but
his tours de force are his sublime characters … You will fall in
love with (or hate) every damn sexy, well-read, disillusioned one
of them.” —Daily Mail
“Whether you read the nicely poised conclusion of A Hand Reached
Down to Guide Me as defeated or optimistic, the narrator speaks
with the authentic voice of hard-won experience: "I can still
sing," he notes. "Having some age on me, maybe I sound more like
the real thing." This could be Gates' own 68-year-old hand reaching
down. For he is the real thing, as is illustrated on every page of
this sad, hilarious and unflinchingly brilliant book.” —The
Independent
“It is an absolute delight to be back in his masterful hands.
Reading David Gates is far from an uncomplicated experience; his
writing is dark, bitter, hilarious, truthful and complex, full of
emotional turmoil and damaged characters, deeply flawed people
doing pretty unspeakable things to themselves and others, and yet
the self-aware flickers of humour, the knowing nods to the frailty
of human existence, make him utterly compulsive…On the evidence of
the new book, Gates remains a formidable and important writer for
our times. And Jernigan retains its crazed power as a novel. Read
them both.” —Independent on Sunday
“Gates’s 1991 novel, Jernigan…charted its eponymous anti-hero’s
descent into alcoholism in a perfect balancing act of horror and
hilarity. Like that memorable debut, all 12 stories in A Hand
Reached Down to Guide Me are set in the north-eastern US, where
references to the Puritan past form an ironic contrast to the
insatiable appetites of the present. Whatever “lane” Gates lures
his characters down, you can be sure it will lead through the
Valley of Humiliation — although the prospect of perdition at the
end is, just occasionally, tempered with surprising glimmers of
redemption.” —Financial Times
“Gates is a technically excellent writer who can brilliantly
illuminate the insides of his characters’ heads. There’s a
truthfulness to this book that is both the best and most depressing
thing about it.” —Glasgow Herald
“Gates is a truly formidable talent, but you’d be wary of having
him over to dinner: you’d wonder what he was thinking.” —Sunday
Times
“While David Gates’ style is different, the tone edgier, he shares
Richard Ford’s understanding of the self-desctructive aspects of
human nature…Gates’ strengths are sharp, witty dialogue, sexual
tension and subtlety. Also, a non-judgmental tone, even when his
characters do something devastatingly cruel…In each story, we
witness humanity in their weakest, most shameful moments: ‘I went
back to working...until—God, must we? Until I was able to sell my
father’s house’ (A Hand Reached Down). I suspect it is this—shall
we call it courage? — that attracts readers.” —Irish Examiner
“Gates’ brilliance is all the more surprising given the seemingly
restricted nature of his milieu…Gates unearths hard-won truths and
makes sure they’re funny, too.” —Metro
“Ferociously talented…this new collection of stories…is a testament
to his singular genius.” —Catholic Herald
Ask a Question About this Product More... |