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A dazzling new collection of interconnected stories by the National Book Award finalist.
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 tackle this question head-on.
Vera, the shy, anarchist daughter of missionary parents, leaves her family for love and activism in New York. A generation later, her own doubting daughter insists on the truth of being of two minds, even in marriage. The adulterous son of a Florida hotel owner steals money from his family and departs for Paris, where he takes up with a young woman and finds himself outsmarted in turn. Fools ponders the circle of winners and losers, dupers and duped, and the price we pay for our beliefs.
Fools is a luminous, intelligent, and rewarding work of fiction from the author for whom the Boston Globe said, "No other writer can make a few small decisions ripple across the globe, and across time, with more subtlety and power."
"Starred Review. Though they make bad choices and exhibit a multitude of faults, Silber's characters display wonderfully lifelike vulnerability and complexity." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. This powerful and moving collection by a National Book Award finalist (Ideas of Heaven ) recalls Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad in its novelistic cohesion of multiple sprawling tales." - Library Journal
"Starred Review. Silber deftly handles a variety of time periods and places with enough recurring motifs - the sorting of donated clothes, the inexplicable marketability of gum, the alienating power of appearance - to link them all together and creates a memorable meditation on work, religion, love, and the search for personal integrity." - Booklist
"A thought-provoking collection; "Buying and Selling" is particularly strong." - Kirkus
"Joan Silber's stories are like compressed novels. They are interlocking tales that fill in the history of revolutionary politics in the twentieth century." - Edmund White
"Fools is 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
"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
"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
This information about Fools was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Joan Silber was raised in New Jersey and received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied writing with Grace Paley. She moved to New York after college and has made it her home ever since. She holds an M.A. from New York University.
She's written nine books of fiction, most recently Secrets of Happiness, published in May 2021. Her novel Improvement won The National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award. She also received the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. Her other works of fiction include Fools, longlisted for the National Book Award and finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, The Size of the World, finalist for the Los Angeles Times Prize in Fiction, and Ideas of Heaven, finalist for the National Book Award and the Story ...
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