What is in the bag behind the Devils chair? Knowledge of some kind? Surely something a little girl did not know should be left alone. Ive been criticizedand sometimes admiredfor what some readers see as my affinity with cruelty, both in my depictions of it and my supposed infliction of it on characters. In The Devils Treasureaptly subtitled A Book of Stories and Dreamsthe iconic author Mary Gaitskill has created a chimerical hybrid of fiction, memoir, essay, criticism, and visual art that transcends categorizationThis collage of four novels (one a work in progress), interspersed with and thematically linked by a single short story, then woven together with the authors commentary, is a kind of directors cut revealing the personal and societal forces that inform each individual piece of work, an ongoing, passionate exploration of core human emotions and experience, the ideally, sometimes quixotically high and grossly, confusedly low. With the stylistic daring and preternatu