Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You

"Amy Bloom gets more meaning into individual sentences than most authors manage in whole books."

--The New Yorker


A great short story has the emotional depth and intensity of a poem and the wholeness and breadth of a novel. Amy Bloom writes great short stories. Her first collection, Come to Me, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and here she deepens and extends her mastery of the form.

Real people inhabit these pages, the people we know and are, the people we long to be and are afraid to be: a mother and her brave, smart little girl, each coming to terms with the looming knowledge that the little girl will become a man; a wildly unreliable narrator bent on convincing us that her stories are not harmless; a woman with breast cancer, a frightened husband, and a best friend, all discovering that their lifelong triangle is not what they imagined; a man and his stepmother engaged in a complicated dance of memory, anger, and forgiveness. Amy Bloom takes us straight to the center of these lives with rare generosity and sublime wit, in flawless prose that is by turns sensuous, spare, heartbreaking, and laugh-out-loud funny.

These are transcendent stories: about the uncertain gestures of love, about the betrayals and gifts of the body, about the surprises and bounties of the heart, and about what comes to us unbidden and what we choose.

The author of "Come to Me" and "Love Invents Us" now presents a stunning new collection of short stories on the frontiers of emotion.

Amy Bloom is the author of Come to Me, a collection of stories, and Love Invents Us, a novel. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Antaeus, Story, Mirabella, Self, Vogue, and Talk, among other publications, and in many anthologies here and abroad, including The Best American Short Stories; Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards; The Secret Self: A Century of Short Stories by Women; and The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction. Also a practicing psychotherapist, she lives in Connecticut.

A blind man can see how much I love you — Rowing to Eden — Night vision — Light into dark — Stars at elbow and foot — Hold tight — The gates are closing — The story.