Two Sides, Three Rivers

In Sharon Dilworth's new collection, Two Sides, Three Rivers, the award-winning writer explores the way that a city shapes the lives of those who live there. Set in and around contemporary Pittsburgh, Dilworth's stories are populated by characters who are attempting to escape their circumstances in a city already constrained by its physical borders and industrial legacy. The power of place helps define them. Displaced ­Russians use a Gilded Age cemetery in Squirrel Hill as a makeshift stand-in for Moscow. An aspiring private eye discovers that his talents are useless in a town where everyone knows everyone else's business. A young boy tries to reinvent himself only to find that he cannot willfully discard his working-class roots. Robbing the elderly poor, a deceitful musician deprives them of their memories, music, and their worn-out keepsakes. Again and again, the city exerts its own hypnotic power, and its streets, shops, and neighborhoods help shape motives, actions, and character.

As skillfully as Sherwood Anderson chronicled small town life in Winesburg, Ohio or F. Scott Fitzgerald captured the divisions between East and West Egg, Sharon Dilworth has mapped the contradictions and ambiguities of Rust Belt America by exploring a city caught between its rapidly fading past and the uncertain promises of its future. With Two Sides, Three Rivers, she has turned Pittsburgh into another landmark in American fiction.

Sharon Dilworth is the author of two collections of short stories, The Long White and Women Drinking Benedictine, and two novels, Year of the Ginkgo and My Riviera. She has received an Iowa Award in Short Fiction, a Pushcart Prize in Fiction, and a Hopwood Award as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She currently lives in Pittsburgh, where she is the Director of the Creative Writing program at Carnegie Mellon University.