Books by Author Joan Silber

by Joan Silber
|
6 books
Read more... Read less...

Secrets of Happiness

Joan Silber, 2021
Ethan, a young lawyer in New York, learns that his father has long kept a second family—a Thai wife and two kids living in Queens. The interlocking fates of both families lead the story to stops in Asia and a history of bargains for love and money as the story loops around surprise loyalties, love triangles, and reservoirs of joy. A Washington Post and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year.

Improvement

A Novel
Joan Silber, 2018
A bold and piercing novel about a single mother in New York with a boyfriend just out of jail, a knowing and eccentric aunt with a married past in Turkey, and a decision that leads to an accidental death, with consequences for many. Winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction.

Fools: Stories

Joan Silber, 2013
When is it wise to be a fool for something? From New York to India to Paris, characters tackle this question head-on. Vera, the 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 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. Longlisted for National Book Award.

The Size of the World

A Novel
Joan Silber, 2008
The elusive connection between place and happiness” is explored by six men and women who leave familiar surroundings for foreign landscapes. From an American engineer in wartime Vietnam to a storekeeper’s daughter in Mussolini’s Italy to an American married to a Thai Muslim against her family’s wishes, the fates of people cross and wind around each other, as each narrates a life-story marked by the jolts of encounters in a wider world. Finalist, Los Angeles Times Prize in Fiction.

Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories

Joan Silber, 2005
Beset by love and longings, this array of characters comes to see the ways “sex and religion [are] always fighting over the same ground…each running into the breach left by the other.” With settings as diverse as modern New York, Renaissance Venice, and the late-nineteenth-century China of endangered missionaries, I pioneered in this collection my method of letting a minor element in one story become major in the next. Finalist for National Book Award and Story Prize.

The Art of Time in Fiction

As Long as It Takes
Joan Silber, 2009
As a writer whose stories often cover whole lifetimes, I’ve grappled with fiction’s unique task of conveying time. This study looks at how various great writers have decided how much time a story needs to shape its meaning, and the art of convincing a reader that “three decades have passed in the five hours it took to read certain pages.” With examples from world fiction—Gustave Flaubert to Arundhati Roy to Chinua Achebe—the book illuminates work both familiar and new. It is a favorite of writers who teach and has gone into a second printing.