Joan Silber
From AwardAnnals
Information about the author.
Works
- 2 works
- Show titles only
The Size of the World: A Novel
Joan Silber
Love and family loyalty meet up with the allure of far-off vistas in elegant new fiction by an acclaimed novelist.
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.
In the book’s opening, an engineer in Vietnam is shaken to discover why his company’s planes are getting lost. A modern marriage between a Thai Muslim and an American woman leads to a terrible family fight. In 1920s Siam a young woman experiences the colonial stance of her tin-prospecting brother. The last section returns the brother to the States, older now but ever in love with Asian women.
Love, loss, yearning, self-delusion, and forgiveness are here in ways fresh and surprising. And in the tradition of E.M. Forster, seeing the size of the world changes the meaning of home-sickness for all the characters.
Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories
Joan Silber
Supple and precise, these stories cover lifetimes, much in the manner of Alice Munro and William Trevor. Set in France, Italy, New York, and China, in the past and present, they are about longings—about how sex and religion 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.
