ISBN: 0-88739-298-9
300 pp.
Size: 6 x 9
Pub Date: 6/2000
Paperback Original
Price: $14.95
|
Lover's Question, A
Thomas Farber
Thomas Farber's works of fiction, creative non-fiction, and the epigrammatic reveal him as a writer charting the voyage of his generation with luminous, scrupulous integrity. Anatomist, ironist, and moralist, he achieves large effects with deceptively simple means. Such elegant economy, unsentimental but deeply compassionate, compels us to recognize these lives-in and out of love-as our own. The stories selected here, with an introduction by the author, are from Who Wrote the Book of Love? (1977), Hazards to the Human Heart (1980), and Learning to Love It (1993).
Spare, humorous, and dazzlingly perceptive, these stories are about men and women caught up in the conflicts of desire. Undone or obsessed by the most ordinary problems, these people are out of or in love, whatever the cost. In these stories, Thomas Farber unflinchingly illuminates the evasions and foibles of daily life even while reminding us of love's renewing possibilities.
Review: "Like the book's themes, the structure is a continual surprise of perspective...a beautiful feeling of everything coming together in space and time-and yes, even in a kind of love."
-The New York Times
"...sharply conceived and brilliantly executed...his prose is as spare and specifying as black-and-white photography...His gift is real."
-The Nation
"Stunning...to be reread and remembered with pleasure."
-Chicago Tribune
"...quietly devastating. The people in these stories stay with you, and in fact you begin to run into them everywhere you go."
-Rolling Stone
"[Farber] continues to write gently and compassionately of major moments in minor lives-real people paddling doggedly, furiously against the current."
-Kirkus Reviews
"...delicately crafted..."
-Publishers Weekly
Bio: Awarded Guggenheim and (three times) National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships for fiction and creative non-fiction, THOMAS FARBER has been a Fulbright scholar, recipient of the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize, and Rockefeller Foundation scholar at Bellagio. He is currently Senior Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.
|
