Fools – Stories - Hardcover

Joan Silber's stories charm us. And amuse us. And engage us. And move us. And even enlighten us. Fools embraces us all. --Amy Bloom

I loved Fools. The stories always surprised me, with the narratives unfolding as if in real time, and then turning unexpected in so many ways, twisting into stories that felt like remembered history, but with such added emotion that I thought about the characters for several days afterward as if they were here in my house. --Susan Straight"

Joan Silber s stories charm us. And amuse us. And engage us. And move us. And even enlighten us. Fools embraces us all. --Amy Bloom"

Fools is a wonderfully winning exploration of impetuousness in all of its appalling and appealing forms, and its deftly interconnected stories are devoted to those dreamers who act rashly out of their better natures, who never quit asking the world, Can t you do better than that? a question certain to become increasingly urgent as this twenty-first century progresses. --Jim Shepard"

Fools is a unique and fascinating collection that celebrates not so much a place or a family or a single life as it does an idea anarchy as it runs through three generations of loosely connected people. The collective vision this provokes is what makes the book intellectually satisfying, the separate lives it convincingly displays are what move the heart. --Antonya Nelson"

Fools is great fiction. Here are anarchists and pacifists, protesters in causes to do with freedom and equality, causes to which these self-aware men and women devote themselves or not. It is impossible not to be enthralled. --Christine Schutt"

Joan Silber's stories are like compressed novels. They are interlocking tales that fill in the history of revolutionary politics in the twentieth century.--Edmund White

Fools is astonishing for its range, for its sweeping sense of time and place, and most especially for its deep insight into the way small choices can circle out to shape lives, and even human history.This is a beautiful book and an important literary achievement. --Dan Chaon"

In Joan Silber s dazzling new story collection, written in elegant prose and with clairvoyant wisdom, the loves and aspirations, both spiritual and material, of six very different people reaffirm in unexpected ways the fallibility and the essential sameness of our human condition.--Lily Tuck"

Fools is astonishing for its range, for its sweeping sense of time and place, and most especially for its deep insight into the way small choices can circle out to shape lives, and even human history. This is a beautiful book and an important literary achievement. --Dan Chaon

Joan Silber is the author of six previous works of fiction. Among many awards and honors, she has won a PEN/Hemingway Award and has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City.