Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories

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

"Her writing is intelligent, perceptive, funny and quite beautiful...Pearlman's view of the world is large and compassionate, delivered through small, beautifully precise moments...These quiet, elegant stories add something significant to the literary landscape...The volume is an excellent introduction to a writer who should not need one. Maybe from now on everyone will know of Edith Pearlman." --Roxana Robinson, New York Times Book Review

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.