“Nobody writes like Schutt, the National Book Award–finalist author of Florida, and her latest collection is the perfect entry point for readers new to her work…In each of the collection’s 11 stories, Schutt gives readers dissipated women staggering to the brink of sanity, desperate men with foggy intentions, and an eerie atmosphere that radiates menace, sexuality, and murder…Schutt is always in control in this work by an experimental American writer of unparalleled style.”

—Publishers Weekly

Christine Schutt is already easily among the liveliest stylists of our time, and these eleven stories prove we ain’t seen nothing yet. Each is a wonder, pickled in her crystalline idiom and cured under her brutal, astonishing wit.”

— Claire Vaye Watkins

“Schutt's distinct and economic style is on full display throughout this slim collection…. Schutt offers surprising reminders of the ghastly and gruesome that are never too far away….Through this, [she] maintains a dark wit that keeps it buoyant. …Intimate portrayals of darkness told in Schutt's tight and affecting prose.”

–Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

“Schutt’s short stories portray flawed characters wrestling with resentment, loneliness, and mortality. …Schutt’s restrained, provoking tales hold detailed impressions at arm’s length, as it were, leaving readers to explore life’s uneasy truths viewed through an unrelenting lens.”

–Booklist

In Pure Hollywood, the genius of Christine Schutt’s prose is as mysterious and undeniable as ever, its brilliance all the more remarkable for the darkness it explores, the disturbing realities it illuminates. Her soul-sick characters stalk and haunt your heart every bit as much as Flannery O’Connor’s. But even as she unnerves us, Schutt’s fiction renders more light, more life, more beauty. Don’t be fooled by its size. This book is a masterwork that hits way harder than its weight class, and achieves what great fiction always achieves—it commands us to be aware.”

— Matt Sumell