Fools – Stories - Softcover

Sly, graceful.

A wonderfully winning exploration of impetuousness in all of its appalling and appealing forms.--Jim Shepard

Silber deftly constructs whole, fully realized lives in just a few pages, and her use of first-person narratives gives these stories an intimate, confessional feeling, as if you've struck up a conversation with a particularly talkative stranger.

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

Excellent...the pleasure of Ms. Silber's overlapping tales is that in all of them characters do something to surprise you.

So well made and pleasurable...[Silber] kicks ass.

Joan Silber is one of the wisest, finest, most capacious observers of the human condition writing now. We should all be as heartbreakingly foolish and beautiful as the characters in this collection. Silber understands them inside out, and brings them close to us, as no one else can.--Stacey D'Erasmo

A unique and fascinating collection...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

Dazzling...written in elegant prose and with clairvoyant wisdom.--Lily Tuck

Great fiction...It is impossible not to be enthralled.--Christine Schutt

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.