Synopses & Reviews
Longlisted for the 2015 National Book Award -- and a nationwide bestseller.
Over
the past several decades, Edith Pearlman has staked her claim as one of
the all-time great practitioners of the short story. Her incomparable
vision, consummate skill, and bighearted spirit have earned her
consistent comparisons to Anton Chekhov, John Updike, Alice Munro, Grace
Paley, and Frank O'Connor. Her latest work, gathered in this stunning
collection of twenty new stories, is an occasion for celebration.
Pearlman
writes with warmth about the predicaments of being human. The title
story involves an affair, an illegitimate pregnancy, anorexia, and
adolescent drug use, but the true excitement comes from the evocation of
the interior lives of young Emily Knapp, who wishes she were a bug, and
her inner circle. "The Golden Swan" transports the reader to a cruise
ship with lavish buffets -- and a surprise stowaway -- while the lead story,
"Tenderfoot," follows a widowed pedicurist searching for love with a new
customer anguishing over his own buried trauma. Whether the characters
we encounter are a special child with pentachromatic vision, a group of
displaced Somali women adjusting to life in suburban Boston, or a staid
professor of Latin unsettled by a random invitation to lecture on the
mystery of life and death, Pearlman knows each of them intimately and
reveals them to us with unsurpassed generosity.
In prose as
knowing as it is poetic, Pearlman shines a light on small, devastatingly
precise moments to reflect the beauty and grace found in everyday life.
Both for its artistry and for the recognizable lives of the characters
it renders so exquisitely and compassionately, Honeydew is a
collection that will pull readers back time and again. These stories are
a crowning achievement for a brilliant career and demonstrate once more
that Pearlman is a master of the form whose vision is unfailingly wise
and forgiving.
Review
"To read an Edith Pearlman story is to sense a mysterious voice singing
just under the surface of the prose; it is to be so beguiled by elegance
and wit that the inexorable surging power of the story astonishes when
it finally hits the reader. Honeydew is brilliant. Edith Pearlman is
among the greatest of the greats." Lauren Groff, New York Times
bestselling author of Arcadia and The Monsters of Templeton
Review
"Reading a Pearlman story is like entering the jet stream of some
stranger's life. You feel the rush and fear and excitement, and then you
exit, overcome but satisfied. Her nuanced stories, each one a small
gem, explore complicated relationships and strange conundrums found in
everyday life." San Fransisco Chronicle
Review
"Pearlman repeatedly thrills us by opening up secret worlds, and it's
because of the exquisite care with which these worlds are formed that we
come to care deeps about her her people ('characters' just doesn't cut
it)....Her stories hold a reverence for the magical, the anomalous, and
the chance encounters all around us....Something about this book feels
so urgent, so wise, and it had me turning pages until the wee hours." The Millions
About the Author
Edith Pearlman's collection Binocular Vision won the National Book
Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award, as
well as the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Story Prize. The author
of several other story collections, she has also received the
PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the short story. Her widely admired
stories have been reprinted numerous times in The Best American Short
Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Pushcart Prize. A New
Englander by both birth and preference, Pearlman lives with her husband
in Brookline, Massachusetts.