WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
PEN/MALAMUD AWARD
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST
THE STORY PRIZE FINALIST
LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE FINALIST
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE DECADE, SUNDAY TIMES, LONDON
In this sumptuous offering, one of our premier storytellers provides a
feast for fiction aficionados. Spanning four decades and three
prize-winning collections, these twenty-one vintage selected stories and
thirteen scintillating new ones take us around the world, from Jerusalem
to Central America, from tsarist Russia to London during the Blitz, from
central Europe to Manhattan, and from the Maine coast to Godolphin,
Massachusetts, a fictional suburb of Boston. These charged locales, and
the lives of the endlessly varied characters within them, are evoked
with a tenderness and incisiveness found in only our most observant
seers.
No matter the situation in which her characters find themselves--an
unforeseen love affair between adolescent cousins, a lifetime of
memories unearthed by an elderly couple's decision to shoplift, the
deathbed secret of a young girl's forbidden forest tryst with the tsar,
the danger that befalls a wealthy couple's child in a European inn of
misfits--Edith Pearlman conveys their experience with wit and aplomb,
with relentless but clear-eyed optimism, and with a supple prose that
reminds us, sentence by sentence, page by page, of the gifts our
greatest verbal innovators can bestow.
Binocular Vision reveals a true American original, a master of the
story, showing us, with her classic sensibility and lasting artistry,
the cruelties, the longings, and the rituals that connect human beings
across space and time.
