About the Book
In this collection of impeccably written essays, Schwartz tells us early on that she never thought of her life as a “continuous line” but rather a series of intertwined interrupted experiences. Hers is a life that has been bumped, tumbled, and smoothed by an endless stream of travel, fascinating people, and books: writing them, pondering them, translating them.
Her essays range from musings about the art of translation, the tribulations of major surgery dissected with biting wit, a quest for recovery from the 9 /11 attacks at a music school, and hours spent with friends arguing, drinking and smoking in a neighborhood bar. Her personal narratives range from humorous childhood (an 8-year-old writer) and troubled revelations to learning to be an adult facing the difficulties of simultaneously writing and raising children. We see her as a daughter struggling to understand her parents through adolescent eyes, a mother startled at the all-consuming demands of motherhood and writing, and as an older adult grappling with mortality. Throughout, she is painfully honest, funny, and unafraid of difficult truths. Relentlessly candid, subjecting herself to her own sharp scrutiny, Schwartz is willing to confront the confusions of maturing in a changing world.
Praise for Truthtelling: Stories, Fables, Glimpses
Meticulously crafted. . . . This first-rate collection demonstrates why Schwartz remains an American literary treasure.
—Publishers Weekly
A grab bag of realist and experimental stories, each one a treasure . . . wise, wry, and witty—these stories in all their stylistic variations are perfect.
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
Moving… [the author] has found her way into a new realm of fiction that evades an easy label…the[se] stories feel relevant to the moment.
—Los Angeles Review of Books
This excellent writer has the great gift of making even the slightest of domestic situations feel richly alive to the pleasures we allow and the punishments we inflict on ourselves and one another. It is a joy to read this latest collection of her short fictions.
—Vivian Gornick, author of Fierce Attachments: A Memoir
These wonderful stories about our need for connection and our sense of alienation are timely and timeless at once. Lynne Sharon Schwartz is a dazzling writer.
—Hilma Wolitzer, author of Today, a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket
This elegant new collection includes some of Schwartz’s most surprising and satisfying short works, demonstrating anew her sustained powers as a writer, through an astonishing 28 books and 40 years.
—Alix Kates Shulman, author of Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen
More Praise for Lynne Sharon Schwartz
[Her] insights are at once sympathetic and drenched with irony.
—the New York Times
Disturbances in the Field seems a more-than-welcome return to a classic idea of the novel… A wonder to read… I can think of no other contemporary writer who writes so well, with such rich sensuality.
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
About the Author
Lynne Sharon Schwartz is the author of twenty-eight books of fiction, essays, and poetry, including her 2021 story collection, Truthtelling, as well as the novels Disturbances in the Field, Leaving Brooklyn, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and Rough Strife, a finalist for the National Book Award. She has also published two memoirs, Ruined by Reading and Not Now, Voyager, and has translated from the Italian. Schwartz is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts in Fiction and, separately, for Translation, and the New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. She has taught widely, most recently at the Bennington College Writing Seminars and the Columbia University School of the Arts.