Joan Silber is the author of three previous books. She won the PEN/Hemingway Award for her first novel, HOUSEHOLD WORDS, and has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her short fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Ploughshares, the Paris Review, and other magazines. She lives in New York City and teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College.
Shanghailanders (2024) Juli Min "Shanghailanders is a wonderful and wildly smart and compelling book. If Shanghai is the future, this terrific novel knows it all. We follow a glorious cluster of characters as they trip over their own longings, in this fiction of real astuteness."
Leaving (2024) Roxana Robinson "A remarkable novel-a quietly expansive story, in which elements of love and family coalesce and escalate into tragedy. Leaving has a plot in which surprises abound, as broken conventions lead to menace and threat. A triumph of a book."
Terrace Story (2023) Hilary Leichter "Terrace Story is brilliantly inventive, enchanting, disturbing, beautiful, and unlike anything I've ever read. I loved what it does with time--gone and not gone, lost and found where we never put it. Really extraordinary."
The Apology (2023) Jimin Han "What a superb story this is, unweaving the tangle of family history - and the wrongheaded honor that has walled out love - as this remarkable novel moves from the unguessable to the expansively imagined. It's a maze of leaps - across boundaries beyond the known - as one woman grapples with the impossible question of how wrongs can be righted. A memorable and wonderfully original book."
No Two Persons (2023) Erica Bauermeister "What a joy to see the separate parts of No Two Person leap across time to build its terrific story. When the tragic life of a writer's brother fires the novel she's always wanted to write, its path in the world is beyond what we could guess. I loved the power this plot gives to reading itself, that dear and vital realm of our experience."
I Could Live Here Forever (2023) Hanna Halperin "A superb, uncynical novel about the innocence of unsustainable love - a wonderfully haunting and memorable book."
The Home for Wayward Girls (2023) Marcia Bradley "The Home for Wayward Girls is a searing and triumphant novel. In a story of riveting suspense, it chronicles the twisting struggles of a resourceful and remarkable daughter and the long powers of abuse. Insightful and wonderful to read, this is a book that will make its mark."
Trust (2022) Hernán Diaz "What a joy this is to read, suspenseful at every turn, the work of a rare and impressive talent. Diaz has once again taken apart an American myth and pondered how we lie to ourselves."
Scary Monsters (2022) Michelle de Kretser "Scary Monsters is a marvel. Each of the two very different parts of the novel had me totally riveted, intensely absorbed, wowed by de Kretser's scathing accuracy - whether she's chronicling youth's delights and distortions or a future where prosperity is the new 'unethics.' It's a wildly remarkable book that unfolds like no other."
Dear Miss Metropolitan (2021) Carolyn Ferrell "I think this is really a brilliant book. No one is better than Carolyn Ferrell at capturing the vitality of human voices, and here they blaze out a portrait of the unthinkable, three young women kidnapped for more than a decade. It’s a page-turner genius of a book, astute about the details that sustain, the traps that spring, and what it means to be a girl."
A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself (2021) Peter Ho Davies "Peter Ho Davies has long written brilliantly about accidents of culpability and their winding trails. In A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself he has given us a stunning novel of family life, scrupulous and astute, full of home-truths in every sense. Another triumph by an author whose books I love."
The Sun Collective (2020) Charles Baxter "What a spectacular book this is. A parable for our ominous times, it has revolution, murder, young love, magic, and marital squabbling in its pages—a novel of ideas in sly and modest Baxter form. Quite amazing."
With or Without You (2020) Caroline Leavitt "What a compelling, wonderful read this book is. With or Without You asks the great question of what happens to a long-loving couple if one of them changes utterly. This novel gives us high drama while keeping the fairest possible view of the messy lives of these characters. Another triumph for Caroline Leavitt."
Man of My Time (2020) Dalia Sofer "With Iran so intensely before us, Man of My Time does what only fiction can do. We are inside the mind of a man whose choices keep stunning us, in the violence of politics and in the intimacy of family. A masterful novel, eye-opening in its tale of the multiplying costs of betrayal."
His Favorites (2018) Kate Walbert "The writing is so beautiful and exact—so startling in every sentence—that His Favorites took me way past what I thought I knew. This is a novel that shines with a laser beam, lighting what needs to be lit."
The Garden Party (2018) Grace Dane Mazur "This is a wonderful book. Set at a wedding rehearsal dinner in a garden full of secrets, the story lets us watch time spilling out its chances on an intensely thoughtful cast of characters. And it leaves the reader with the remarkable sensation that happiness is not in contradiction with intelligence."
Gateway to the Moon (2018) Mary Morris "It’s a great joy when a novel so rich in history is also a total page-turner. Gateway to the Moon connects and illuminates, as we see the centuries-long trail of those who survived the Spanish Inquisition through disguise and adaptation. A wonderful book, remarkable in its knowledge and a terrific story."
Tales from the Town of Widows (2007) James Cañón "Like his villagers, James Cañón has built a new world on an old - a realigned literary landscape, with new sex roles, new stubbornness, new glory, and new wreckage. A much-loved tradition of Colombian fiction has been gorgeously re-imagined."
