Joan Silber is the author of eight works of fiction. Among many awards and honors, she has won the PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction and has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City.
"These stories deftly create the ring promised in their subtitle, as major characters in one story reappear as minor players in another. . . . The stories are about rapturous love and devastating loss."
"These stories deftly create the ring promised in their subtitle, as major characters in one story reappear as minor players in another. . . . The stories are about rapturous love and devastating loss."
Silber's collection is described quite appropriately in the subtitle as "a ring of stories." Each of the six tales works well as a standalone piece, but through subtle commonalities they all weave into one spiraling, interconnected example of fiction. Silber uses the ingenious approach of bringing one character, object, or thought forward into the next story to create a ring of narratives that have no real beginning or end. (By the third story, readers will be trying to guess what aspect will be the connecting factor.) Subjects range from an American expatriate teaching yoga in France to missionaries caught in China's Boxer Rebellion. Loss, religion, spirituality, and sex figure in each of the stories in varying doses and are reflected in the perspectives of each narrator. Silber, a former winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for her first novel (Lucky Us), teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College. Recommended for all collections, especially those where short stories have a following.-Leann Isaac, Jameson Health Syst., New Castle, PA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
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