![]() ![]() Pearlman’s stories have begun to reach a wider audience only since the publication of “Binocular Vision,” in 2011. ![]() Then she becomes one of God’s spies, condensing a life into a few sentences, taking on the power of prophecy, knowing-as Psalm 121 describes the Creator-“thy going out and thy coming in.” But Pearlman can also move back from characters, in order to see the entire span of their lives. People are closely attended to and swiftly evoked amid the engrossing particulars of life-clothes, households, parents, children, dailiness of all kinds. Listening is, or should be, intimate, while spying is usually more estranged: Pearlman’s short fiction is interesting for the ways in which it combines proximity and distance. Many of Edith Pearlman’s short stories involve characters who are listening to others or spying on them-the twin conduits, the detail-rich supply lines, of this subtle writer’s system. Photograph by Suzanne Kreiter / The Boston Globe / Getty Pearlman (at her home in Brookline, 2012) is at once a fabulist and a realist. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |