Honeydew

Description

A new story collection from Edith Pearlman, winner of the National Book Critics Circle award and finalist for the National Book Award for Binocular Vision. Over 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 big-hearted spirit have earned her 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 intricate evocation of the interior lives of young Emily Knapp and her inner circle. 'The Golden Swan' transports the reader to a cruise ship with lavish buffets - and a surprise stowaway - while 'Tenderfoot' follows a widowed pedicurist searching for love with a new customer anguishing over his own buried trauma. Whether the characters are Somalian women who've suffered circumcision, a special child with pentachromatic vision 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 with unsurpassed generosity. In prose as knowing as it is poetic, Honeydew is a crowning achievement for a brilliant career, and demonstrates once more that Pearlman is a master of the form whose vision is unfailingly wise and forgiving.

Promotion info

The new collection of stories from the author of the award-winning Binocular Vision.

Awards

US National Book Awards Longlist 2015

Reviews

Praise for Binocular Vision . A spectacular literary revelation Peter Kemp, Sunday Times Gold medal class ... seems beyond compare ... The traditional literary system has worked, though grievously slowly, in giving a genius of the short story her due Mark Lawson, Guardian [Pearlman's stories are] meticulously made, miraculously precise, and so fully populated that you marvel one mind could invent so many distinct human beings from scratch Sam Leith, Financial Times An unsung master The Times [These stories are] pearls that encapsulate resonant moments ... Make up for lost time now and catch up with Pearlman Metro Pearlman writes about the predicaments odd, wry, funny and painful of being human ... [Her] view of the world is large and compassionate, delivered through small, beautifully precise moments. Her characters inhabit terrain that all of us recognize, one defined by anxieties and longing, love and grief, loss and exultation. These quiet, elegant stories add something significant to the literary landscape New York Times

Author description

Edith Pearlman's most recent 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 three other 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.