Mary Gaitskill

Over the last century air travel has evolved from a high-risk experiment involving a few visionary pioneers to an efficient--and often irritating--means for distributing masses of people to the far reaches of the globe. During the hundred-year history of human air travel, it has yielded writing that is, by turns, heroic, dreamy, subversive, and utterly dire. This anthology traces this trajectory from the early letters and memoirs of Wilbur and Orville Wright, and Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, to the diaries of Amelia Earhart. Antoine de Saint-Exupery's heroism gives way to the darkly magical storytelling of Roald Dahl, and the spare, elegiac prose of master stylist James Salter. More recent stories by Erica Jong, Mary Gaitskill, Thomas Beller, Mike Albo, Maxine Swann, and David Sedaris examine an array of contemporary subjects, from the addictiveness of mile-high sex, to etiquette for cramped seating and accounts of racial profiling post--9/11. Flight Patterns promises an entertaining refuge for frequent fliers, and a gateway to dreams for nighttime readers. These writings exude the primal fear and cool perspective that can only come from seeing the world--and one's own life--from a great distance. Flight Patterns renders airplane travel a time capsule of modern life.

A "New York Times "Notable Book A man tells a story to a woman sitting beside him on a plane, little suspecting what it reveals about his capacity for cruelty and contempt. A callow runaway girl is stranded in a strange city with another woman's fractiously needy children. An uncomprehending father helplessly lashes out at the daughter he both loves and resents. In these raw, startling, and incandescently lovely stories, the author of "Veronica "yields twelve indelible portraits of people struggling with the disparity between what they want and what they know. "Because They Wanted To "is further evidence that Gaitskill is one of the fiercest, funniest, and most subversively compassionate writers at work today.