In My Other Life: Stories

Author - Joan Silber ... [Goo?] [Posters]

This Hardcover Book item from Sarabande Books was reviewed on 16-Oct-2008.

Search ISBN:1889330426 offer from Abebooks or used books from Alibris. In My Other Life: Stories Reference Book. Classifications : United States Short Stories Literature & Fiction Subjects Books General Short Stories Literature & Fiction Subjects Books General United States World Literature Literature & Fiction Subjects Books Con . Click the following link to view the cover of In My Other Life: Stories.

Related topics: United States. Short Stories. Subjects. Books. General. Short Stories. Subjects. Books. General. United States.

1) Hardcover Book In My Other Life: Stories by Sarabande Books. In her collection of short stories, Joan Silber probes the complexities of emotion that are trigerred by relationships as they change with time. A central theme of each of the stories is the changes in peoples lives as they grow older: The different people that we become despite remaining the same person with, perhaps, the same issues. In one story, a woman artist struggles with her passivity in having allowed herself to fall into a relationship turned marriage of immigration convenience. Years later, unable to extricate herself from a unsatisfying marriage to a besotted Englsihman, she resigns herself to a life she could have avoided had she marshalled the courage an uncle of hers evinced many years earlier when he finally unloaded his inveterately obnoxious wife. In another story, a hipster restauranteaur in Manhattan´s trendy Lower East Side struggles with the tragic death of a mentaly fragile family member and, in yet another, a now Yuppie realtor on Manhattan´s Upper West Side recounts his hippie days working in a downtown restaurant. This is a book for the reader who wants to delve into psychodynamics and enjoys the downtowmn Manhattan life. Ms. Silber may strike a chord in your own life, as she did with me. I highly recommend this book.¤

2) Hardcover Book In My Other Life: Stories by Sarabande Books. The most amazing thing about this book is that within the first few sentences of each story, you find yourself completely immersed in these peoples lives. Some of the characters are familiar, perhaps people you used to know but you´ve lost touch with over the years. Others are people you know you would have never spent time with, but are fascinated by their experiences. Silber is skilled at describing ordinary experiences in eloquent and sometimes very funny ways. I highly recommend this book of short stories to anyone who has stopped to relect about how their lives could have been if....¤

3) Hardcover Book In My Other Life: Stories by Sarabande Books. In My Other Life gets at the truth of people´s lives. The stories are trying to do something new and wonderful. They don´t have the cliches associated with so much fiction, instead they resemble the way we all come to understand how our lives have become what they are. No great dramatic events...just quiet realizations about what we really are. Silber is really truthful in her writing, and reveals how characters are thinking and feeling so that they seem really alive. A reader can learn a lot about living from this book.¤

4) Hardcover Book In My Other Life: Stories by Sarabande Books. Joan Silber´s In My Other Life is grounded in New York, and each of these stories focuses on the Great Divide--the surprising reversal that separates an old life from the new. From the glories of bad habits in their twenties (you never knew what you would end up doing), Silber´s people move though decades of sobering conclusions and elating accidents. The heroes of these stories are bartenders, painters, ex-drug dealers, birth control counselors, video store managers, people who have been around the proverbial block. The decisive turn can be the breezy agreement to a green-card marriage that lasts for twenty years, or a young mother´s phone call home that sends her toddler away. In "Lake Natasink" (first published in The New Yorker), an ex-junkie keeps taunting a friend who is about to step off the edge into a new family life in the country. In "Ragazzi," two former rock groupies, with families and jobs, try to remember "how they learned not to be idiots." In "What Lasts," newlyweds go from a lifestyle funded by dope smuggling in Turkey to a more mundane income gleaned from retailing women´s underwear. As they nest in a "loft as big as a lake," the couple´s happiness is threatened when a rare illness strikes. Once "too young, too vain, too something to think about the consequences," these veteran characters are witnesses to the ways "your heart gets heavier."¤

5) Hardcover Book In My Other Life: Stories by Sarabande Books. The inhabitants of In My Other Life--bartenders and waitresses, drug counselors, teachers, many with histories of narcotics use or minor criminality--come to engaging life in Joan Silber´s serene, understated prose. She renders even the few fantastic occurrences in her first short-story collection in simple, serviceable phrases, like aluminum cutlery--not the stuff you´d bring out for company, but the battered, durable everyday kind. That Silber can sometimes make a kite or a suspension bridge out of knives and forks is one reason for reading these stories, which in other ways may sound like old New Yorker fiction: short on incident, long on tranquil recollection. In "Without Ellie," a young woman remembers the night that she failed to save the life of her mentally disturbed stepsister, who broke away from her on a Manhattan street one night and was later found beaten and stabbed. In "Partners," a Florida travel agent receives a phone call in the wake of Hurricane Andrew from her old friend and business partner, for many years a drug runner and shady character. Rae tells Nathan about her sojourn in the basement during the hurricane, and, from the safety of middle age, recalls the "tremendous things" they had undergone in their youths: a failed drug buy in La Paz, the new gun that made Nathan "silky and confident."

In fact, they had worn her out, those exciting troubles. She was weather-beaten when they were over. But down in the laundry cellar, with the pipes shaking, she was just as glad to be weather-beaten. All the disasters of her life (and Nathan was far from the worst) seemed reassuring, the grislier the better, she was glad to have them to remember. The trouble stored in her was like a white noise, another roar, to whatever was outside.

Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 13-Nov-2008, 18893304269781889330426, 220-9X0-360-041-261-3IB-8

In My Other Life: Stories, Book, Image © Sarabande Books

Search: Sarabande Books, Book Posters, Book Art