Fools: Stories - Softcover

Silber, Joan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 039334889X ISBN 13: 9780393348897

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014

Synopsis

Longlisted for the National Book Award

"'Linked' doesn’t begin to describe the complex web Silber has woven...Emotionally, it’s astounding...[A] beautiful, intricate, and wise collection." ―New York Times Book Review

When is it wise to be a fool for something? What makes people want to be better than they are? From New York to India to Paris, from the Catholic Worker movement to Occupy Wall Street, the characters in Joan Silber’s dazzling new story cycle tackles this question head-on.

About this title

About the Author

Joan Silber is the author of eight works of fiction. Among many awards and honors, she has won the PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction and has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City.

Review

“Silber deftly constructs whole, fully realized lives in just a few pages, and her use of first-person narratives gives these stories an intimate, confessional feeling, as if you’ve struck up a conversation with a particularly talkative stranger.”
- Boston Globe

“Excellent...the pleasure of Ms. Silber’s overlapping tales is that in all of them characters do something to surprise you.”
- Wall Street Journal

“So well made and pleasurable...[Silber] kicks ass.”
- O, The Oprah Magazine

“Sly, graceful.”
- Daily Beast

“Joan Silber’s stories charm us. And amuse us. And engage us. And move us. And even enlighten us. Fools embraces us all.”
- Amy Bloom

“Joan Silber is one of the wisest, finest, most capacious observers of the human condition writing now. We should all be as heartbreakingly foolish and beautiful as the characters in this collection. Silber understands them inside out, and brings them close to us, as no one else can.”
- Stacey D’Erasmo

“A unique and fascinating collection...The collective vision this provokes is what makes the book intellectually satisfying, the separate lives it convincingly displays are what move the heart.”
- Antonya Nelson

“Dazzling...written in elegant prose and with clairvoyant wisdom.”
- Lily Tuck

“A wonderfully winning exploration of impetuousness in all of its appalling and appealing forms.”
- Jim Shepard

“Astonishing for its range, for its sweeping sense of time and place, and most especially for its deep insight into the way small choices can circle out to shape lives, and even human history. This is a beautiful book and an important literary achievement.”
- Dan Chaon

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 039334889X
• ISBN 13: 9780393348897
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256