Honeydew

by Edith Pearlman

Overview

Over the past several decades, Edith Pearlman has staked her claim as one of the all-time great practitioners of the short story. Her incomparable vision, consummate skill, and bighearted spirit have earned her consistent comparisons to Anton Chekhov, John Updike, Alice Munro, Grace Paley, and Frank O'Connor. Her latest work, gathered in this stunning collection of twenty new stories, is an occasion for celebration.

Pearlman writes with warmth about the predicaments of being human. The title story involves an affair, an illegitimate pregnancy, anorexia, and adolescent drug use, but the true excitement comes from the evocation of the interior lives of young Emily Knapp, who wishes she were a bug, and her inner circle.

"The Golden Swan" transports the reader to a cruise ship with lavish buffets-and a surprise stowaway-while the lead story, "Tenderfoot," follows a widowed pedicurist searching for love with a new customer anguishing over his own buried trauma. Whether the characters we encounter are a special child with pentachromatic vision, a group of displaced Somali women adjusting to life in suburban Boston, or a staid professor of Latin unsettled by a random invitation to lecture on the mystery of life and death, Pearlman knows each of them intimately and reveals them to us with unsurpassed generosity.

In prose as knowing as it is poetic, Pearlman shines a light on small, devastatingly precise moments to reflect the beauty and grace found in everyday life. Both for its artistry and for the recognizable lives of the characters it renders so exquisitely and compassionately, Honeydew is a collection that will pull readers back time and again. These stories are a crowning achievement for a brilliant career and demonstrate once more that Pearlman is a master of the form whose vision is unfailingly wise and forgiving.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316297240
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	01/06/2015
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	656,967
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Edith Pearlman's last collection, Binocular Vision, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award as well as the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Story Prize. The author of three other story collections, she has also received the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the short story.

Her widely admired stories have been reprinted numerous times in The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Pushcart Prize. A New Englander by both birth and preference, Pearlman lives with her husband in Brookline, Massachusetts.

What People are Saying About This

Kelly Link

HONEYDEW is a collection of work so vivid, so true, and so vital that the reader herself comes away all the more real. How can a story do what Pearlman's stories do? She is an incomparable master. —Kelly Link, author of Magic for Beginners and Stranger Things Happen

Lauren Groff

To read an Edith Pearlman story is to sense a mysterious voice singing just under the surface of the prose; it is to be so beguiled by elegance and wit that the inexorable surging power of the story astonishes when it finally hits the reader. HONEYDEW is brilliant. Edith Pearlman is among the greatest of the greats. --Lauren Groff

Alice Mattison

Edith Pearlman is a master of the short story…Pearlman's characters…are complicated, fully alive. You can't stop reading, because you know they'll astonish you on the very next page. --Alice Mattison, author of Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn

Tom Perrotta

HONEYDEW is a stellar collection, a wide-ranging examination of Pearlman's favorite subjects—the mysteries of love and friendship, the indignities and compensations of growing older, and the knotty complexities of the human heart. --Tom Perrotta

Andrea Barrett

Pearlman's work pierces right to the heart. She can capture characters and their whole world in a few perfect lines. In HONEYDEW, as in her other collections, her brilliant economy is matched only by her depth of feeling. --Andrea Barrett, National Book Award winner and author of Servants of the Map

T. C. Boyle

Edith Pearlman is an absolute master of the form.…Her language sings and aches all at once. --T. C. Boyle

Jennifer Haigh

For nearly five decades, Edith Pearlman has written stories that illumine and educate the mind and heart. HONEYDEW is required reading for all of us who love the short story form. To say it stands with the very best of Pearlman's work is the highest praise I can conceive of. --Jennifer Haigh, PEN/Hemingway Award winner and author of The Condition

Anthony Doerr

If you believe gorgeous, scrupulously made literature nourishes the soul, then you must read Edith Pearlman. --Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See and Memory Wall

Ann Patchett

A national treasure. Put Edith Pearlman's stories beside those of John Updike and Alice Munro. That's where they belong. --Ann Patchett

Editorial Reviews

…Pearlman's majestic, fleet-footed new collection, is…cause for celebration. The stories in Honeydew excel at capturing the complex and surprising turns in seemingly ordinary lives…In these stories, the point of view flits nimbly from character to character, allowing the reader to absorb the world from a bird's-eye perspective. The result is like a diorama, simultaneously intimate and removed: We are able to observe both how these characters perceive the world and how the world perceives them…If Binocular Vision launched Pearlman, rightly, into the spotlight, Honeydew should cement her reputation as one of the most essential short story visionaries of our time.

The New York Times Book Review - Laura van den Berg

★ 11/10/2014
Following Binocular Vision, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, Pearlman offers this affecting collection that periscopes into small lives, expanding them with stunning subtlety. The title story is a perfect case in point, a snapshot of a private girls’ school in Massachusetts, where Alice, the respectable headmistress, has become pregnant by Richard, the father of Emily, a troubled but brilliant 11th grader. In this story, as in others, the relationships of the characters reflect the “nature of people to defy their own best interests.” In “Puck,” also set in a small Massachusetts town, antique store owner Rennie, “known for discretion and restraint,” is drawn to Ophelia, a customer who confesses to a love affair. Rennie breaks “cardinal rule one” and advises Ophelia to pursue another customer. Rennie’s heart opens wider in the moving “Assisted Living,” in which she lets the elderly Muffy help out at the antique store, and then is required to dispose of Muffy’s treasures as a series of accidents leads to an inevitable decline. Other gems include the magical “Dream Children,” in which nanny Willa and the father of her ailing charge discover the depth of their connections to the child, and the sensual “Tenderfoot,” in which widow and “expert listener” Paige and newly single Bobby—whose wife left him after he refused to stop to help out at a car accident—connect over their shared fate as “survivors now doomed to mourn until the end of their own days.” (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"Honeydew will afford an international audience another opportunity to enjoy Pearlman's distinctive and memorable fictions... Pearlman's stories--slightly old-fashioned in their use of conceit; refreshingly loose in their capacity for digression or tangent; occasionally Whartonian in the bemused and acidic clarity of their narrative eye--are sui generis...[these stories] share a particular perspective that, like a perfume, floats throughout... to make of life's everyday leavings a life-saving nectar--is perhaps, Pearlman's most consistent endeavor. She is wise, yes, but also unfailingly generous, even joyous... it certainly makes her fiction a fortifying pleasure to read."--Claire Messud, Financial Times

"Edith Pearlman is a contemporary master of the short story, with an utterly distinctive voice-tartly observant, unfailingly compassionate, slyly amused. HONEYDEW is a stellar collection, a wide-ranging examination of Pearlman's favorite subjects-the mysteries of love and friendship, the indignities and compensations of growing older, and the knotty complexities of the human heart."--Tom Perrotta, New York Times bestselling author of Election, Little Children, and The Leftovers

"Exquisite work... Such narrative judgment and authority are a pleasure to be in the presence of... This newest book contains 20 stories in fewer than 300 pages, and even the shortest among them convey a depth and a texture well out of proportion to what their word counts might suggest them capable of."--The Chicago Tribune

"If you have never read Edith Pearlman, you're in for a lovely surprise, and if you have, you're in for another treat... Honeydew is ripe with often bittersweet, unconventional love stories that somehow manage to encompass loss and pain yet reaffirm the value of living... Like Alice Munro, Pearlman deftly encapsulates whole lifetimes in compact stories by focusing on pivotal moments that reverberate over decades."--The Washington Post

"Pearlman is our greatest living American short story writer, and Honeydew is her best collection yet."--The Boston Globe

"Reading a Pearlman story is like entering the jet stream of some stranger's life. You feel the rush and fear and excitement, and then you exit, overcome but satisfied. Her nuanced stories, each one a small gem, explore complicated relationships and strange conundrums found in everyday life."--San Fransisco Chronicle

"The short story master... At her best, Pearlman invigorates our curiosity about others, encouraging us to flip page after page just to see what a character ate for lunch... Pearlman's stories encourage us to sink deeply into them, and we become contented ghosts snooping on these unadorned, authentic lives... The Bottom Line: Pearlman may not be innovating the short-story form, but she's executing it perfectly."--Time Out New York

"There remain a few dedicated practitioners of the short story, and Edith Pearlman is one to be cherished... The 20 stories [in Honeydew] are vinegary, rueful, droll, humane and endlessly inquisitive. Though intricately constructed, they are slight in drama and emphasis, set down like a light footprint that nevertheless fixes itself in one's memory as though pressed in wet cement."--The Wall Street Journal

"Honeydew should cement [Pearlman's] reputation as one of the most essential short story visionaries of our time."--The New York Times Book Review

"A generous collection of depth and sensitivity featuring a range of unusual characters."--O Magazine

"Edith Pearlman's short stories have often been compared with John Updike's, and the comparison is apt...All of the powerful emotions are depicted in rich, controlled prose, one of the earmarks of a Pearlman story. Whether it be for carefully dissecting her characters' feelings or observing tiny details, Pearlman reveals her acute eye time and time again... In the tradition of Joyce, Chekhov, Updike and Munro, Pearlman's surprising, memorable stories are joys to behold."--Shelf Awareness

"Edith Pearlman's work, so wise and witty, pierces right to the heart. Like Grace Paley and Penelope Fitzgerald, she can capture characters and their whole world in a few perfect lines: how does she do that? Her brilliant economy is matched only by her depth of feeling."--Andrea Barrett, author of Servants of the Map and Ship Fever

"Even though [Pearlman's] characters have feet of clay like the rest of us, they often seem to float above the ordinary world like the figures in a Chagall painting... What a pleasure to encounter a writer who can speak volumes in a few short sentences."--The Seattle Times

"HONEYDEW is a collection of work so vivid, so true, and so vital that the reader herself comes away all the more real. How can a story do what Pearlman's stories do? She is an incomparable master."--Kelly Link, author of Magic for Beginners and Stranger Things Happen

"Like Alice Munro, Pearlman confronts the earthier aspects of life without a steady authorial gaze... Pearlman conveys heft and profundity in few words and with the lightest of touches; her climactic revelations are nver thudding or melodramatic, nor do her conclusions trail off disappointingly... Her stories are beautifully crafted and formally coherent... The stories in Honeydew are original, unsentimental and profoundly bizarre... unforgettable."--Commentary

"Pearlman repeatedly thrills us by opening up secret worlds, and it's because of the exquisite care with which these worlds are formed that we come to care deeps about her her people ("characters" just doesn't cut it)... Her stories hold a reverence for the magical, the anomalous, and the chance encounters all around us... Something about this book feels so urgent, so wise, and it had me turning pages until the wee hours."--The Millions

"Pearlman's short fiction is interesting for the ways in which it combines proximity and distance... Pearlman can also move back from characters, in order to see the entire span of their lives. Then she becomes one of God's spies, condensing a life into a few sentences, taking on the power of prophecy... Pearlman's fiction brings together, with uncanny wisdom, short views and long views: the hours of lives and the length of our lives. She is tender and distant at once."--James Wood, The New Yorker

"Prepare to be dazzled. Edith Pearlman's latest, elating work confirms her place as one of the great modern short-story writers... Vivacity and zest enliven every page. Body language is wittily caught... Personalities are keenly explored. Honeydew elatingly continues the celebration of life's diversity to which Binocular Vision so excitingly introduced us."--Sunday Times (UK)

"These elegant, compassionate stories bring 'regular' people to complex life. Pearlman's flawed characters demand your attention and win your heart."--People Magazine

"This affecting collection periscopes into small lives, expanding them with stunning subtlety... Magical and sensual."
--Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

"To read an Edith Pearlman story is to sense a mysterious voice singing just under the surface of the prose; it is to be so beguiled by elegance and wit that the inexorable surging power of the story astonishes when it finally hits the reader. Honeydew is brilliant. Edith Pearlman is among the greatest of the greats."--Lauren Groff, New York Times bestselling author of Arcadia and The Monsters of Templeton

Pearlman returns with another collection of closely observed, often devastating stories . . . [She] writes with the wisdom of accumulated experience . . . Pearlman fills volumes with her economy of language . . . [and] serves up exemplary tales, lively and lovely."--Kirkus (Starred Review)

From the Publisher

12/01/2014
The stories in this collection from National Book Critics Circle winner Pearlman (Binocular Vision) have settings that range from the 1950s to the self-Googling 21st century. In "Hat Trick," four teenage girls pick the name of their future husbands from a hat, while "Blessed Harry," a schoolteacher and part-time shoe salesman, receives a scam email inviting him to give a lecture in London. Pearlman sets a number of stories in Godolphin, MA, "a wedge of Boston"; Godolphin resident Rennie is mentioned in at least four stories including "Blessed Harry." Harry's wife spies on him once a week from Rennie's antique shop; in "Conveniences" she is the unseen aunt and owner of the second-floor apartment where the story takes place, but in "Puck" and "Assisted Living," she and her shop take center stage. The stories all have characters or situations that are a little weird; Harry's family has an anthropomorphic plant; in "Fishwater," Lancelot's aunt writes fictohistoriographia, a genre that through fiction rewrites history; and in "Deliverance," a cook at a soup kitchen uses unorthodox methods to cure mental illness. VERDICT This is good-natured if at times a mildly disturbing compilation that will appeal to most readers of short fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 7/21/14.]—Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. Lib., MD

Library Journal

Edith Pearlman, the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award winner for BINOCULAR VISION, offers another collection of painfully succinct observations of the ordinary events and people who find themselves under her microscope. Pearlman’s economy of language creates imagistic prose that feels like poetry. It’s especially effective on audio, thanks to Suzanne Toren’s artistry. Toren pulls listeners into the unusual lives of a pedicurist who is an excellent listener, a big-hearted antique dealer, Louie-the-vegetable-man—who is “not composed of fruit or vegetables”—and a family with an anthropomorphic plant. She creates credible, complicated characters—from Somali refugees in Boston to a stowaway on a cruise ship. The cast is large and memorable, the stories piercing and perceptive, and Toren’s performance puts a unique stamp on each remarkable piece. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

FEBRUARY 2015 - AudioFile

★ 2014-10-22
Pearlman (Binocular Vision, 2011, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award) returns with another collection of closely observed, often devastating stories of more or less ordinary life.Pearlman is a poet of eyes and hair; nearly every story features an observation, often in the form of an arresting image, of these features. So it is that in the opening story, in which an art historian figures, a woman appears whose "eyes in her lightly wrinkled face were the blue of a Veronese sky," and so it is, in seeming homage to Chekhov, that in another story, a character sports "brown hair, too much of it, a blunt nose and chin, and a habit, during conversation, of fastening his gaze on one side of your neck or the other." A vampire? No, just another character who's not quite comfortable inside his or her own skin, as so many of Pearlman's characters are not. Pearlman, who is in her late 70s, writes with the wisdom of accumulated experience, and many of her characters have suffered the loss of spouses, even if they themselves are not yet of age. One comparative youngster, a spry 49, has just lost her husband in war: "Each of his parts was severed from the others," Pearlman writes arrestingly, "and his whole—his former whole—was severed from Paige." Every word counts in that sentence, and Pearlman fills volumes with her economy of language, even if so much is devoted to such not-quite-usual matters as "corneal inlays" and people who bear odd sobriquets: "Louie the vegetable man was not composed of fruit or vegetables. He was composed of a cap, a face with little eyes and a big nose and a mouth missing some teeth, and a pile of assorted clothing from a junk shop." Without quite the moral gravity of Alice Munro but with all the skill: Pearlman serves up exemplary tales, lively and lovely.

Kirkus Reviews