Edith Pearlman

new & selected stories

Binocular vision

A new story collection from the author of Binocular Vision, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and finalist for the National Book Award. Over the past several decades, Edith Pearlman has staked her claim as one of the all-time great practitioners of the short story. Her incomparable vision, consummate skill, and bighearted spirit have earned her consistent comparisons to Anton Chekhov, John Updike, Alice Munro, Grace Paley, and Frank O'Connor. Her latest work, gathered in this stunning collection of twenty new stories, is an occasion for celebration. Pearlman writes with warmth about the predicaments of being human. The title story involves an affair, an illegitimate pregnancy, anorexia, and adolescent drug use, but the true excitement comes from the evocation of the interior lives of young Emily Knapp, who wishes she were a bug, and her inner circle. "The Golden Swan" transports the reader to a cruise ship with lavish buffets-and a surprise stowaway-while the lead story, "Tenderfoot," follows a widowed pedicurist searching for love with a new customer anguishing over his own buried trauma. Whether the characters we encounter are a special child with pentachromatic vision, a group of displaced Somali women adjusting to life in suburban Boston, or a staid professor of Latin unsettled by a random invitation to lecture on the mystery of life and death, Pearlman knows each of them intimately and reveals them to us with unsurpassed generosity. In prose as knowing as it is poetic, Pearlman shines a light on small, devastatingly precise moments to reflect the beauty and grace found in everyday life. Both for its artistry and for the recognizable lives of the characters it renders so exquisitely and compassionately, Honeydew is a collection that will pull readers back time and again. These stories are a crowning achievement for a brilliant career and demonstrate once more that Pearlman is a master of the form whose vision is unfailingly wise and forgiving.

Stories

Honeydew

Lauren Groff

Deborah Eisenberg

Jim Shepard

Alice Munro

Presents a collection of short stories judged to be the best in America and Canada for 2012, along with essays by three distinguished writers and jurors on their favorite pieces.

The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013

'The best short story writer in the world' Susan Hill, The Times Honeydew is the first collection from Edith Pearlman since Binocular Vision, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and a 'spectacular literary revelation' (Sunday Times). Over the last few decades, Edith Pearlman has staked her claim as one of the great practitioners of the short story. Her understanding and skill have earned her comparisons to Anton Chekhov, John Updike and Alice Munro. Her latest work, gathered in this stunning collection of twenty new stories, is an occasion for celebration. The stories in Honeydew are unmistakably by Pearlman; whole lives in ten pages. They are minutely observant of people, of their foibles and failings, but also of their moments of kindness and truth. Whether the characters are Somalian women who've suffered circumcision, a special child with pentachromatic vision or a staid professor of Latin unsettled by a random invitation to lecture on the mystery of life and death, Pearlman knows each of them intimately and reveals them with generosity.

Elena Ferrante

Andrew Durbin

Paul Crenshaw

Simone White

Ruvanee Pietersz Vilhauer

Natasha Lvovich

Sara Batkie

Shannon Burns

Kim Vodicka

Lydia Conklin

Douglas Watson

Taylor Fox

Benjamin T. Miller

Jess Dutschmann

Cean Gamalinda

Laura Goldstein

Debbie Hu

Jason Katzenstein

Sue Landers

Kelin Loe

Laura Marie Marciano

Filip Marinovich

Miranda McLeod

Steve Roggenbook

Matthew Socia

Casey Wiley

A Literary Journal

Epiphany Issue 13

Chosen by Joanna Scott as winner of the 2003 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction.

How to Fall

"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" --Inside flap.

New & Selected Stories

Binocular Vision

Edith Pearlman

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