Lynne Sharon Schwartz

The emotionally realistic and elegant portrait of mourning in the days and months following 9/11 As Renata, a linguist for the New York City Public Library, crosses the Brooklyn Bridge on her way to work one morning, she looks up to see a flash of orange and blue. Two planes have hit the World Trade Center, and with that, her world changes entirely.   Renata's connection to the tragedy grows deeper as her boyfriend, an overzealous social worker,...

Retirement doesn't spell the end after all, in this rousing journey through loss and rebirth Max has lived a long and fulfilling life. He and his wife were star trapeze artists and acrobats in the Brandon Brothers circus. But with her passing, he's left alone in New York, and suffers a heart attack after a terrifying mugging. Without family to fall back on, Max is forced to leave his beloved Manhattan for a rest home in Westchester. He fears it will...

An injury at birth left Audrey with a wandering eye. Though flawed, the bad eye functions well enough to permit her an idiosyncratic view of the world, one she welcomes in the stifling postwar Brooklyn of the 1950s. During a journey to Manhattan to see a doctor about her sight, she begins to explore the sexual rites of adulthood. But can her romance last? In this beautifully observed novel, Lynne Sharon Schwartz raises themes of innocence and escape...

With a reader's perspective and a master writer's skill, critically acclaimed novelist Lynne Sharon Schwartz takes on the world at large Communication, while essential, is almost impossible to maintain perfectlya truism Lynne Sharon Schwartz demonstrates in this stunning essay collection. In one section, she discovers that one typo could completely derail a project while translating an Italian account of the Holocaust. In another essay, she deconstructs...

Everyone has a face that they show to the outside worldbut our thoughts, fears, and perversions lie just beneath Referred pain" describes the sensation of pain, not at the actual point of injury, but somewhere else in the body. This disorientation of the senses is felt, in one way or another, by many of the characters in this collection from Lynne Sharon Schwartz, one of America's foremost chroniclers of contemporary life.   In the title novella,...

A rich and diverse collection of stories detailing life in all its daily battles and yearnings Lynne Sharon Schwartz is a master of tone, deft at creating realistic settings and characters. In Acquainted with the Night, she unleashes sixteen wickedly smart, wholly believable short stories. In the title story, for instance, a man's nocturnal battle against a floating globule in his eye forces him to question his very state of being. In Mrs. Saunders...

Schwartz, an author, offers insight into why we read and how what we read shapes us.

Every year when families gather for the Passover holiday, the youngest child poses that question as part of the poetic Four Questions near the start of the Seder. The answers are no less than the story of a people bound in slavery, their suffering in a foreign land, and their ultimate liberation-the story of Passover. Here the Four Questions are presented with refreshing clarity, providing insight into the symbols and rituals of the holiday.