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
Media 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.
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