In My Other Life

Joan Silber's characters have a hard-won wisdom that, after all, is afforded to them straight and true. The language of these wonderful stories is just that too, clean and sharp, funny and wise. I loved the various men and women and children--the wounded, the hopeful, the uncertain, the lucky--who people Silber's landscape. --Jane Hamilton

Joan Silber writes with wisdom, humor, grace, and wry intelligence. In her astonishing, unusual stories, characters who lived one life when they were young emerge, after metamorphoses almost Ovidian, bewildered and grateful in another. They bear with them welcome news of how we all survive. --Andrea Barrett

The beautiful and eloquent restraint of these stories gives to Joan Silber's new collection an overall equanimity of tone, which is remarkable, considering the wildness that has been buried in these characters' lives. Most of her characters have taken a few walks on that wild side and have now settled down, but their pasts have a way of returning, no matter what. This book is in part a series of gentle shocks and reminders of those former lives, before rehab, before sanity, before equanimity took over. In its quiet way, this book is about the secret life of an entire generation of urban Americans. --Charles Baxter


Genre: Literary Fiction