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‘An Old Virgin’ describes a nurse’s obsession with her forty-three-year-old patient’s virginity; in the urban fable ‘Mirrorball’ a man steals a girl’s soul during a one-night stand; ‘College Town 1980’ follows a group of listless young people adrift in Ann Arbor, debating the meaning of personal strength at the start of the Reagan era; ‘Folk Song’ opens with a list of newspaper headlines before dissecting the lives of the characters behind the features, including a murderer who gives a prime-time interview and a woman from San Francisco attempting to break a world record by having sex with one thousand men. Full of jagged, lived emotion, broken people and powerful, original writing, ‘Don’t Cry’ is a testament to Gaitskill’s formal range and incomparable excavation of character.