For The Daily Beast, she named five must-read short-story collections. One book on her list:Alone With You by Marisa SilverRead about another book on the list.
Former screenwriter/director Marisa Silver published her first short story in The New Yorker’s first “Debut Fiction” issue in 2001. She followed up with a collection, Babe in Paradise, and two novels, No Direction Home and The God of War, all set in Southern California and following families dealing with abandonment, economic struggles, and separation. Her new collection (eight stories, three first published in The New Yorker) showcases her uncanny ability to tap into the unsettled nature of our times.
In “Temps,” an Oklahoma transplant rooming with another temp worker in a loft in L.A. finds herself in a love triangle that happens almost at random. In the O. Henry Award-winning “The Visitor,” a VA hospital nurse’s aide acts out a vicious empathy in working a triple amputee. Other characters who find themselves in extremis—dying of cancer, recovering from suicidal depression, adjusting to life after emergency bypass surgery—somehow find the confidence to move forward into uncertainty. As the 37-year-old in “Leap” whose heart surgery changed her life puts it, “Assumptions that the earth would be there to meet her foot when she put it down, or that her body would remain upright without her expressly willing it were no longer certain, and she found herself hesitating more than she used to, as though to give the world a chance to announce its true intentions.”
Also see: The Page 69 Test: Marisa Silver's The God of War.
--Marshal Zeringue
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