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Book Cover for: Fools, Joan Silber

Fools

Joan Silber

Reader Score

74%

74% of readers

recommend this book

Nominee:National Book Award -Fiction (2013)

When is it wise to be a fool for something? What makes people want to be better than they are? From New York to India to Paris, from the Catholic Worker movement to Occupy Wall Street, the characters in Joan Silber's dazzling new story cycle tackles this question head-on.

Book Details

  • Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
  • Publish Date: Apr 14th, 2014
  • Pages: 256
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.35in - 5.53in - 0.63in - 0.46lb
  • EAN: 9780393348897
  • Categories: Short Stories (single author)Literary

About the Author

Silber, Joan: - 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.

More books by Joan Silber

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Book Cover for: Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories (Revised), Joan Silber
Book Cover for: Secrets of Happiness, Joan Silber
Book Cover for: Size of the World, Joan Silber
Book Cover for: Lucky Us, Joan Silber
Book Cover for: Improvement, Joan Silber
Book Cover for: In My Other Life, Joan Silber
Book Cover for: Household Words, Joan Silber
Book Cover for: In My Other Life: Stories, Joan Silber

Praise for this book

A wonderfully winning exploration of impetuousness in all of its appalling and appealing forms.--Jim Shepard
Astonishing for its range, for its sweeping sense of time and place, and most especially for its deep insight into the way small choices can circle out to shape lives, and even human history. This is a beautiful book and an important literary achievement.--Dan Chaon
Joan Silber is one of the wisest, finest, most capacious observers of the human condition writing now. We should all be as heartbreakingly foolish and beautiful as the characters in this collection. Silber understands them inside out, and brings them close to us, as no one else can.--Stacey D'Erasmo
A unique and fascinating collection...The collective vision this provokes is what makes the book intellectually satisfying, the separate lives it convincingly displays are what move the heart.--Antonya Nelson
Dazzling...written in elegant prose and with clairvoyant wisdom.--Lily Tuck
Great fiction...It is impossible not to be enthralled.--Christine Schutt
Silber deftly constructs whole, fully realized lives in just a few pages, and her use of first-person narratives gives these stories an intimate, confessional feeling, as if you've struck up a conversation with a particularly talkative stranger.-- "Boston Globe"
Excellent...the pleasure of Ms. Silber's overlapping tales is that in all of them characters do something to surprise you.-- "Wall Street Journal"
So well made and pleasurable...[Silber] kicks ass.-- "O, The Oprah Magazine"
Sly, graceful.-- "Daily Beast"
Joan Silber's stories charm us. And amuse us. And engage us. And move us. And even enlighten us. Fools embraces us all.--Amy Bloom
I loved Fools. The stories always surprised me, with the narratives unfolding as if in real time, and then turning unexpected in so many ways, twisting into stories that felt like remembered history, but with such added emotion that I thought about the characters for several days afterward as if they were here in my house.--Susan Straight