Description
Book SynopsisLONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
When is it wise to be a fool for something? From New York to India to Paris, from the Catholic Worker movement to Occupy Wall Street, the characters in Joan Silber's dazzling connected stories 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 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 finds himself outsmarted in turn. Fools ponders the circle of winners and losers, dupers and duped, and the price we pay for our beliefs, offering readers an unforgettable look at work, faith, love and the eternal quest for personal integrity.
Trade ReviewStructurally, the intricacy is skillful; emotionally, it's astounding...
Beautiful, intricate and wise * New York Times Book Review *
Excellent . . . the pleasure of Ms. Silber's overlapping tales is that in all of them characters do something to surprise you. * Wall Street Journal *
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 *
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's stories
charm us. And
amuse us. And
engage us. And
move us. And even
enlighten us.
Fools embraces us all. -- Amy Bloom
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 consists of
cunningly, surprisingly interlinked short stories, which in this case wind their way through the last American century - in particular, the last one hundred years of belief, commitment, monogamy, integrity, all the things that complicate our lives and take us out of ourselves..."You don't know what you're going to be faithful to in the world, do you?" asks the narrator of "Two Opinions" plaintively, and Silber's characters illustrate this unpredictability with a whole range of dilemmas, all of them carefully and intricately imagined. Silber, I can tell, is never going to let me down, and I will keep a copy of one of her books, one I haven't yet read, on a special emergency get-out-of-book-jail-free shelf. -- Nick Hornby * The Believer *
