S.J. Parris
S.J. Parris writes about her inspiration for Heresy, which masterfully blends true events with fiction into a page-turning murder mystery set on the sixteenth-century Oxford University campus.
Adam Haslett
A conversation with Adam Haslett, author of Union Atlantic, a deeply affecting portrait of the modern gilded age, the first decade of the twenty-first century.
A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You: Summary and book reviews of A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You by Amy Bloom, plus links to an excerpt from A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You and a biography of Amy Bloom.
A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You Stories
by
Amy Bloom
Hardcover: Jul 2000,
208 pages.
Paperback: Jul 2001,
208 pages.
A great short story has the emotional depth and intensity of a poem and the wholeness and breadth of a novel. Amy Bloom writes great short stories. Her first collection, Come to Me, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and here she deepens and extends her mastery of the form.
Real people inhabit these pages, the people we know and are, the people we long to be and are afraid to be: a mother and her brave, smart little girl, each coming to terms with the looming knowledge that the little girl will become a man; a wildly unreliable narrator bent on convincing us that her stories are not harmless; a woman with breast cancer, a frightened husband, and a best friend, all discovering that their lifelong triangle is not what they imagined; a man and his stepmother engaged in a complicated dance of memory, anger, and forgiveness. Amy Bloom takes us straight to the center of these lives with rare generosity and sublime wit, in flawless prose that is by turns sensuous, spare, heartbreaking, and laugh-out-loud funny.
These are transcendent stories: about the uncertain gestures of love, about the betrayals and gifts of the body, about the surprises and bounties of the heart, and about what comes to us unbidden and what we choose.
Book Reviews
Booklist - Danise Hoover
It is difficult to know where to begin to praise this masterful collection of short stories by a practicing psychotherapist .... With tender, albeit sharp, sensibilities and ringingly precise use of language, the author affirms the absolute and essential need to heal, to survive, and to love.
Kirkus Reviews
Bloom's precisely observed, rhetorically nervy stories sometimes strain our credulity--but they burrow unerringly into her people's damaged hearts and worried minds with intensity every bit as compassionate as it is clinical.
Michael Cunningham
Amy Bloom is possessed of great subtlety and rock-solid integrity. Her stories crackle with subvert revelation. She is a compassionate writer who, more important, loves the world too much to sentimentalize it.
Robert Stone
Amy Bloom's work takes ordinary lives under examination and discovers the strange elements that render no life ordinary. Her characters and situations give the sense of things happening for the first time to inimitable individuals.
Jane Hamilton
Amy Bloom's masterful stories take place at the point where love and desire collide with convention. At once achingly funny and heartbreaking, these stories live on long past the print and the page.
The Postmistress is an unforgettable tale of the secrets we must bear, or bury. It is about what happens to love during wartime, when those we cherish leave. And how every story-of love or war-is about looking left when we should have been looking right.
Masterfully blending true events with fiction, this blockbuster historical thriller delivers a page-turning murder mystery set on the sixteenth-century Oxford University campus.
Kostova's masterful new novel travels from American cities to the coast of Normandy, from the late 19th century to the late 20th, from young love to last love. The Swan Thieves is a story of obsession, history's losses, and the power of art to preserve human hope.
What drives a man to stay in a marriage, in a job? What forces him away? Is love or conscience enough to overcome the darker, stronger urges of the natural world? The Unnamed is a deeply felt, luminous novel about modern life, ancient yearnings, and the power of human understanding.
Lisa See has written a great book! This story is satisfying on many levels, some scenes horrifying, but seemingly truthful, and her handling of the ...
read more
I was sorry to see that there were so few reviews. I started reading COAL and could not stop. The only thing I am going to say is that I wish ...
read more
The tragedy, the sorrow, the loss, is almost too much for me to recommend this; on the other hand Mistry made me believe I knew these characters. I ...
read more
UK Orange Award longlist announced(Mar 17 2010) Hilary Mantel, Sarah Waters and Barbara Kingsolver have made the longlist for the 2010 Orange Prize, a 20-strong list described by chair Daisy Goodwin as...
Full Story
National Book Critics Circle Awards announced(Mar 11 2010) Each March, the NBCC present awards for the finest books and reviews published in English (in the USA) the previous year in six categories: Fiction,...
Full Story