Imagine a Great White Light (First Edition)

This collection of nine stories is the most recent winner of Pushcart's annual editors' award for "overlooked manuscripts of enduring literary value." Writing with a quiet humor tinged by pathos, Schwartz chronicles the endless permutations of middle-class (and frequently Jewish) despair. In "Mutatis Mutandis," a teenager's obsession with a scholar at a Jewish summer camp is evoked with precision and clarity. "A Tough Life" tells the tragic though funny story of a young girl's love for her hopelessly criminal loser of an uncle. Several stories have an ambiguous and surreal quality, and the reader's inability to distinguish reality from fantasy forges an uneasy bond with Schwartz's characters. "Double Lives" presents a couple whose marriage seems to have run out of steam. Sarah, the narrator, has taken to following her husband, Nick, on his daily run. She usually loses him, though, and at one point muses, "I don't know where Nick goes when he runs. Sometimes he is gone for hours. Sometimes he returns after a few minutes, as tired as if he had run the same distance but in another dimension, double time. I never ask where he's been." By turns dreamy and hard-edged, these stories are disturbing and, occasionally, profound.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In these nine bittersweet short stories, Schwartz reveals her mastery of the form by consistently developing mutifaceted characters, interesting plots, and dramatic tension in the space of a few dozen pages. Her slice of life is distinctly 1960s to 1980s Jewish American, but her themes are universal: the traumas of childhood, the difficulty of maintaining relationships, the tenacious grip of misunderstanding and guilt, and the failure to come to terms with one's past. There's a lot of pain here, but it is relieved by moments of humor, absurdity, hope, and insight. This work has the power and scope of Joyce Carol Oates's fiction but is more entertaining and less depressing. Schwartz either touches on or deals explicitly with drugs in several stories, managing to steer a realistic passage between yesterday's hip romanticism and today's simplistic anti-drug hysteria. Winner of the publisher's ninth annual Editors' Book Award, this collection is highly recommended for public, academic, and young adult collections.
- Jim Dwyer, California State Univ. at Chico
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.