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.
Many of Elliott's stories revolve around this same basic relationship: a man and a woman who don't have sex (at least in the traditional sense) but instead reenact cycles of hurting and being hurt, or as Elliott puts it, "The idea of two people finding each other. A person who wants to be hurt and another who wants to hurt someone." At the same time, there is a progression throughout the book as he moves from the random dangers of his early, uninformed experiences through the highly ritualistic S&M scene found online and finally to his healthiest relationships, which are still different from social norms but also contains elements of love and happiness not found in his earlier experiences. Softcover, 168 pages.