Honeydew

A new story collection from Edith Pearlman, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and finalist for the National Book Award for Binocular Vision. Over several decades, Edith Pearlman has staked her claim as one of the all-time great practitioners of the short story. Her incomparable vision, consummate skill and big-hearted spirit have earned her comparisons to Anton Chekhov, John Updike, Alice Munro, Grace Paley and Frank O'Connor. Her latest work, gathered in this stunning collection of twenty new stories, is an occasion for celebration. Pearlman writes with warmth about the predicaments of being human. The title story involves an affair, an illegitimate pregnancy, anorexia and adolescent drug use, but the true excitement comes from the intricate evocation of the interior lives of young Emily Knapp and her inner circle. 'The Golden Swan' transports the reader to a cruise ship with lavish buffets - and a surprise stowaway - while 'Tenderfoot' follows a widowed pedicurist searching for love with a new customer anguishing over his own buried trauma. Whether the characters are Somalian women who've suffered circumcision, a special child with pentachromatic vision or a staid professor of Latin unsettled by a random invitation to lecture on the mystery of life and death, Pearlman knows each of them intimately and reveals them with unsurpassed generosity. In prose as knowing as it is poetic, Honeydew is a crowning achievement for a brilliant career, and demonstrates once more that Pearlman is a master of the form whose vision is unfailingly wise and forgiving.