3 books by Joan Silber
Requirements: ePUB Reader, 1.5 mb
Overview: 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.
Genre: Fiction > General Fiction/Classics
Household Words: The year is 1940, and Rhoda Taber is pregnant with her first child. Satisfied with her comfortable house in a New Jersey suburb and her reliable husband, Leonard, she expects that her life will be predictable and secure. Surprised by an untimely death, an unexpected illness, and the contrary natures of her two daughters, Rhoda finds that fate undermines her sense of entitlement and security. Shrewd, wry, and sometimes bitter, Rhoda reveals herself to be a wonderfully flawed and achingly real woman caught up in the unexpectedness of her own life.
Ideas of Heaven: Intense in subject yet restrained in tone, these stories are about longings—often held for years—and the ways in which sex and religion can become parallel forms of dedication and comfort. Though the stories stand alone, a minor element in one becomes major in the next. In "My Shape", a woman is taunted by her dance coach, who later suffers his own heartache. A Venetian poet of the 1500s, another storyteller, is introduced to a modern traveler reading Rilke. His story precedes a mesmerizing narrative of missionaries in China. In the final story, Giles, born to a priesthood family, leans toward Buddhism after a grievous loss, and in time falls in love with the dancer of the first story. So deft and subtle is Joan Silber with these various perspectives that we come full circle surprised and enchanted by her myriad worlds. National Book Award finalist.
The Size of the World: A richly imagined novel—set in wartime Vietnam, Thailand, Mexico, Sicily, and contemporary America—about men and women whose jolting encounters with the unfamiliar force them to realize how many “riffs there are to being human.” Travelers, colonials, immigrants, and returned ex-pats meet or pass one another in narratives spanning lifetimes.
Plots wind and twist around each other, making surprising links across a wide field. In the book’s opening, an American engineer is sent to Vietnam in 1968 to find out why his company’s planes keep drifting off course. The solution shakes him and settles him forever in Thailand, married to a new culture. Another marriage between a Thai Muslim and an American woman leads to a rift with her Sicilian family, and years later, her sad, sweet return home is marked by our government’s suspicion of her Asian allegiances. The character most in the spotlight is an American tin prospector in Siam of the 1920s, casual in his colonial stance toward his mistress and his proud Muslim manager. At the end, the prospector is back in the States, ever in love with Asian women and burdened with knowing too much of what happened to the faulty planes.
Love, loss, yearning, self-delusion, and forgiveness are here in ways that are fresh and morally probing. Joan Silber’s use of historical material is brilliantly unsentimental and uncondescending. And in the tradition of E. M. Forster, seeing the size of the world changes the meaning of homesickness for all of these unforgettable men and women.
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