Lynne Sharon Schwartz

The author explores the role of books and literature in our lives, interweaving the story of her own Brooklyn childhood with memories of special books and thoughts on how books have shaped her world

A Life in Books

Ruined by Reading

As a child, Lydia Rowe developed clear and distinct ideas about what made for the harmonious life. As a grown woman, married to an artist, in close contact with friends she's had since college, mother of four children, and engaged in her career as a pianist, she seems to have achieved that harmony; her life has the order, balance and complexity of the classical trios she loves to play. Until one day when two policemen arrive at her door, and with a few words turn her delicately calibrated existence into complete disarray. In a novel of captivating realism, Lynne Sharon Schwartz explores tragic loss and broken faith, the disconnect between one's expectations of life and what one gets. Disturbances in the Field is deeply engrossing, richly told, and uncommonly astute. Book jacket.

A Novel

Disturbances in the Field

In a tale of emotional survival in post-9/11 New York City, thirty-four-year-old Renata deals with the effects of the bombings on her personal life, in light of the trauma she has already experienced.

The Writing on the Wall

No Way Out but Through

An injury at birth left Audrey with a wandering eye. Though flawed, the bad eye functions well enough to permit her an idiosyncratic view of the world, one she welcomes in the stifling postwar Brooklyn of the 1950s. During a journey to Manhattan to see a doctor about her sight, she begins to explore the sexual rites of adulthood. But can her romance last? In this beautifully observed novel, Lynne Sharon Schwartz raises themes of innocence and escape while illuminating the rich inner life of a singular girl.

Leaving Brooklyn

Traces the author's journey of self-discovery as reflected by her travel experiences in both childhood and adulthood, in a personal account that also explores how travel and the modes through which people engage in travel reveal truths about a person's needs and identity.

A Memoir

Not Now, Voyager

In Joyce Carol Oates’s story “The Translation,” a traveler to an Eastern European country falls in love with a woman he gets to know through an interpreter. In Lydia Davis’s “French Lesson I: Le Meurtre,” what begins as a lesson in beginner’s French takes a sinister turn. In the essay “On Translating and Being Translated,” Primo Levi addresses the joys and difficulties awaiting the translator. Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Crossing Borders: Stories and Essays About Translation gathers together thirteen stories and five essays that explore the compromises, misunderstandings, traumas, and reconciliations we act out and embody through the art of translation. Guiding her selection is Schwartz’s marvelous eye for finding hidden gems, bringing together Levi, Davis, and Oates with the likes of Michael Scammell, Harry Mathews, Chana Bloch, and so many other fine and intriguing voices.

Stories and Essays about Translation

Crossing Borders

Everyone has a face that they show to the outside world—but our thoughts, fears, and perversions lie just beneath “Referred pain” describes the sensation of pain, not at the actual point of injury, but somewhere else in the body. This disorientation of the senses is felt, in one way or another, by many of the characters in this collection from Lynne Sharon Schwartz, one of America’s foremost chroniclers of contemporary life. In the title novella, a son of Holocaust survivors circumvents his discomfort over his parents’ history through a Kafkaesque series of dental procedures. In another story, a professor’s sexual attraction to one of his students leads him down a twisted path of misplaced identity. Laced with Schwartz’s satirical, acidly intelligent wit, Referred Pain displays the peak of her ability.

Stories

Referred Pain

The Fatigue Artist is a refreshingly candid story about life, love, and survival in the contemporary world. A writer living in New York City, Laura is overwhelmed by a mysterious lethargy and retreats to her bed where she reflects on the loves and losses of her recent past and seeks the cure to her perplexing tiredness. Fortified by the Eastern teachings of her Tai Chi instructor and the nurturing attentions of friends and a acupuncturist, Laura crawls out of her somnambulism with intelligent determination in search of peace and resurrection. The Fatigue Artist is both a moving chronicle of a woman's search for meaning and a wry depiction of modern urban life.

Fatigue Artist

Award–winning novelist, poet, and essayist, Lynne Sharon Schwartz returns with what is perhaps her most personal book yet. These memoirs, gathered under the title of "Intimate Glimpses," are exactly that. Intimate recollections of her life, beginning with her serious heart–valve surgery and ranging back in time, from going to movies as a child, to her relationship with her complicated and challenging parents, her own difficulties with intimacy and anger, thoughts about long friendships, and the pure delight of grandchildren. It will surprise none of her readers that after a lifetime of playing the piano and moving from place to place for her entire adulthood, she finds a different, richer sort of fulfillment as a middle–aged woman taking African drum lessons in Manhattan. every piece in this wonderful collection is an adventure. In this her twenty–fourth book, Schwartz remains, as was said of her by Frederick Busch, "precise and unflinching." she is a writer of elegant style and captivating honesty, about herself, those around her, and the world at large. These reflections, certain to move and disturb, enlighten and entertain, affirm that Lynne Sharon Schwartz is one of the finest writers of her generation.

Intimate Glimpses

This Is Where We Came In

“A grab bag of realist and experimental stories, each one a treasure . . . Wise, wry, and witty—theses stories in all their stylistic variations are perfect.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review A man generously lends his car to his ex-wife, and is bewildered when she not only neglects to return it but makes increasingly implausible excuses for her actions. A neat and orderly clothing store owner is taken in and manipulated by an ailing elderly neighbor. A wife left by her husband for a younger woman is forced to visit the couple in order to see her children—and makes a startling realization about her former spouse. In these stories and others, including an O. Henry Award winner and a Best American Short Stories selection, National Book Award finalist Lynne Sharon Schwartz presents readers with a cast of indefatigable New Yorkers whose long-established routines are disrupted by mishaps or swerves of fate. “Meticulously crafted . . . This first-rate collection demonstrates why Schwartz remains an American literary treasure.” —Publishers Weekly

Stories, Fables, Glimpses

Truthtelling

Why is this night different from all other nights? Every year when families gather for the Passover holiday, the youngest child poses that question as part of the poetic Four Questions near the start of the Seder. The answers are no less than the story of a people bound in slavery, their suffering in a foreign land, and their ultimate liberation – the story of Passover. Here the Four Questions are presented in breathtakingly luminous paintings by Ori Sherman. Whimsical animals parade through a unique format that can be read straight through in English or turned upside down to focus on the delicate Hebrew calligraphy and ingenious split-frame pictures. Each side of the Seder table can see its own variation of the richly colored scenes as elephants eat matzoh, monkeys dip herbs into water, and lions recline in newfound freedom. Author Lynne Sharon Schwartz answers the questions with refreshing clarity, providing insight into the symbols and rituals of the holiday. Experience a glorious art book, a beautiful book for the kids who find the afikomen, and a wonderful way to experience Passover and its unique celebration of freedom.

The Four Questions

The emotionally realistic and elegant portrait of mourning in the days and months following 9/11 As Renata, a linguist for the New York City Public Library, crosses the Brooklyn Bridge on her way to work one morning, she looks up to see a flash of orange and blue. Two planes have hit the World Trade Center, and with that, her world changes entirely. Renata’s connection to the tragedy grows deeper as her boyfriend, an overzealous social worker, begins to take care of a baby orphaned by the attacks. And then she meets a mute teenage girl in the rubble of the Twin Towers who may or may not be her long lost niece—a family connection as tenuous as it is painful. The winner of New York magazine’s Best Literary Fiction award in 2005, this novel evocatively represents the forms of grief in the wake of major trauma.

Silvana Gandolfi

In Venice, Italy, ten-year-old Elisa finds she must deal with all the unexpected consequences of her beloved eccentric grandmother's transformation into a giant Aldabra tortoise, native to a small group of coral islands in the Seychelles.

Aldabra, Or, The Tortoise who Loved Shakespeare

The arithmetic of marriage is never easy to understand—as time passes, the variables constantly change Caroline is set adrift in 1950s Rome when she meets Ivan. Though things start slowly, Ivan wins her over after a strong pursuit, and the two marry, agreeing never to inflict any “irreparable wounds.” But though Ivan proves to be a fine father, he is a distant husband, and Caroline finds herself daydreaming of other men. So as the years pass, the couple finds ways to bend but not break their cardinal rule. Rough Strife, the first novel from Lynne Sharon Schwartz, was nominated for the National Book Foundation Award. In this sensational debut, Schwartz depicts a marriage that grows painfully into the modern era, despite the changes—both political and personal—that challenge it.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz

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