Alone with You

What a pleasure to read a writer who knows just what she's doing -- yet surprises abound, ironies accumulate, anxieties percolate throughout these pages ... Silver's handle on sun-drenched anomie is right up there with Didion's in her Play It As It Lays days. Don't miss this slim yet weighty collection.

Silver's collection is delicately observed and deeply felt, marking her as one of the most intelligent, stylish and serious writers of our time. These stories are subtle, often sad, always moving, each of them woven finely and with a sense of grace and propulsion. Written with her signature authority, whether she's inhabiting the world of a mentally challenged girl and her child or a fascination with a veteran's wound, Silver's accounts are not only accomplished, sophisticated and heartrending, but singular, branded with her ongoing desire to explore the psychological conflicts of our time.

What a fantastic collection of short stories. Each one, extraordinary. What a treat to read these powerful tales. Silver is the real deal.

Marisa Silver takes the short story to the peak of its art in this finely wrought, sensitive collection which takes readers from a night train to Frankfurt to the loft district of downtown Los Angeles. She is a keen and sensitive observer, a serious writer who honors the quotidian with insight and style. These eight stories - many of which first appeared in the New Yorker - can be read as a primer on the state of the art of contemporary short fiction. Silver is one of the genre's top practitioners, and this superb collection deserves your close attention. There isn't a weak story in this luminous collection.

A superb book -- thoughtful, subtle, complex -- by a tremendously accomplished author. Each story included here is markedly different from the others, yet there is a marvelous coherence and unity to the collection as a whole: the difficulties of communication with, the often unnavigable distances between those among whom there should be the greatest intimacy: parents and children, husbands and wives, friends and lovers. Silver writes with immense intelligence, and in restrained, elegant prose; fellow writers will find much to envy, and much to which they'll aspire. Her dimensional, nuanced characters and the difficult, deeply human scenarios in which she places them -- and for which she refuses to provide neat resolutions -- will appeal and provide gratifying challenges to sophisticated readers of short fiction.