How to Fall : Stories

by Pearlman, Edith

• ISBN13: 9781932511116
• ISBN10: 1932511113
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-02-28
• Publisher: Sarabande Books

Summary

Edith Pearlman manages to combine subtlety with extravagance, understatement with spectacle, drawing our focus to the eccentricities of those who would prefer to remain unnoticed. . . . Confronted with unexpected obstacles, these characters exchange the blurring comfort of routine with spontaneity and improvisation . . . . Full of vivid, intricate, nuanced portraits, confidently focused, restrained and yet spirited, saturated with a powerful imaginative sympathy, How to Fall is a remarkable collection by a remarkable writer.-From the Foreword by Joanna Scott How to Fall is a darkly humorous collection that welcomes the world's immense variety with confidence. Spanning no fewer than four countries in sixty years, these sixteen stories flesh out the complexities of people who, at first glance, live ordinary, unremarkable lives. Widowers, old men, estranged spouses, young restaurant workers, career women and Jewish grandmothers are all at the center of Pearlman's cool, studied observation. Each character is rendered with such unpredictable intricacy that they often astonish themselves just as much as the reader. Many of the stories either begin or wind their way back to one, mythical, two-by-three-mile Massachusetts town-Godolphin, a place that "called itself a town but was really a leafy wedge of Boston." Edith Pearlman has published over 100 stories in national magazines, literary journals, anthologies and online publications. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize collection, New Stories from the South: The Year's Best and The Pushcart Prize collection. Her first collection of stories, Vaquita, won the Drue Heinz Prize for Literature, and her second, Love Among the Greats, won the Spokane Prize for Fiction. She now lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Foreword	xi
Joanna Scott
How to Fall	3	(16)
Signs of Life	19	(12)
Eyesore	31	(16)
Mates	47	(6)
The Large Lady	53	(14)
Trifle	67	(18)
Vegetarian Chili	85	(2)
Rules	87	(16)
Home Schooling	103	(16)
Shenanigans	119	(14)
Madame Guralnik	133	(12)
The Message	145	(8)
If Love Were All	153	(30)
Purim Night	183	(20)
The Coat	203	(14)
The Story	217	(10)
The Author	227