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.