Face to Face: A Reader in the World - Hardcover

Schwartz, Lynne Sharon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807072206 ISBN 13: 9780807072202

Publisher: Beacon Pr, 2000

Synopsis

From the author of the acclaimed Ruined by Reading, a new book about making connections in our increasingly disconnected and technologically mediated world

Following Ruined by Reading, Face to Face takes the author from her solitary life in books to her shared life with others —from the most marginal encounters on the street to the close relationships that sustain her.

Beginning with the title piece—a witty and insightful look at how the telephone has changed the way we relate to each other—Schwartz leads readers through a landscape of our attempts at connection. The author encounters a brilliant student silenced by his experiences in Vietnam and a page turner whose grace eclipses the performance of the pianist she assists. Schwartz makes peace with a cat, loses interest in a date, catches a stranger's eye, and is startled by her own image seen through a loving photographer's lens.

As always, we recognize ourselves in her sometimes wary, sometimes hopeful, and always fiercely intelligent gaze. Face to Face is essential reading for all who value human relationships in our rapidly changing world.

"Schwartz is at home with the personal essay, a form that, ideally, bonds writer and reader into a kind of intimate literary friendship. . . in each [piece] she shares her humanity with her readers. These essays are candid, refreshingly modest, self-analytical but free of what Lopate calls 'the stench of ego.'" — Diane White, Boston Globe, May 2, 2000

"In Face to Face, her second collection of personal essays, the novelist Lynne Sharon Schwartz resembles one of her fictional characters: a sensitive, family-oriented semibohemian whose tastes are literary but refreshingly unstuffy and whose sense of humor tends toward the sly and offbeat. . . . Schwartz's strongest essays demonstrate her gift as a storyteller." —New York Times Book Review

About this title

About the Author

Lynne Sharon Schwartz is the acclaimed author of many books including Ruined by Reading (Beacon / 08070-7083-1 / $10.00 pb), Disturbances in the Field, and In a Family Way. She lives in New York City.

From Publishers Weekly

A fixture in the New York literary world, novelist and essayist Schwartz (Ruined by Reading; In the Family Way) offers up 15 personal essays that explore everything from the sociological influence of the telephone to her first dress, all in charming, insightful prose. Schwartz displays a talent for understanding not just language but also the psychological complexities of friendship and family relations. In "Help," she analyzes her guilt about hiring a black housekeeper named Mattie ("She knew better than I, knew in her bones, the palpable boundaries drawn by class and race and money"); in "Drive, She Said," the author examines her fear of her father's driving ("I suspected that if not for my fear I could and would drive as boldly as he did. I yearned to do this and I dreaded it, and I despised myself for my fear"); in "Being There," she recalls her first apartment, on Manhattan's Riverside Drive, lost to fire ("In that apartment we raised two children, and I made myself into a writer instead of dreaming it, and I learned that the getting of wisdom is something other and more fruitful than finding out the right things to do on every occasion"). But one occasionally feels that this eloquent, discerning book is perhaps too well written: one almost longs for a break from Schwartz's consistently thoughtful, self-consciously smart sensibility. After a few chapters, such consistency presents few surprises. Still, New Yorkers who recognize Schwartz's references will surely find pleasure in these engaging essays. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Beacon Pr
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0807072206
• ISBN 13: 9780807072202
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 214