Our heartiest congratulations to contributor Edith Pearlman, who won the National Book Critics Circle award last week for her story collection Binocular Vision (Lookout Books, 2011), which was also a nominee for the National Book Award (the only fiction nominee to be on both lists) and won the PEN/Malamud prize for short fiction. Pearlman is the author of three other story collections, and she’s published more than 250 pieces of prose. Her award is long overdue.
We’re honored to have published her work five times, most recently “Life Lessons” in our latest issue, 8.2. We posted a sneak preview of that story here, and you can see her comments on it here.
In honor of her win, we wanted to repost comments Pearlman sent us when we asked about her story “Hearts and Flowers” in Issue 7.1 (Summer 2010):
“I would like to promote writing as an amateur enterprise. There are very few artistic endeavors and sports that do not have an amateur component—think of painting, singing, theatricals; think of tennis and soccer and baseball. There are opera companies that are largely amateur; there are amateur architects. Writing as a hobby can be taken up as seriously as writing as a profession. The craft can be studied, practiced, and mastered for the pleasure of only a few readers, just as the amateur pianist has only a household audience and the tennis player no audience at all. A few readers? I am happy with one—that is to say, all my writing is directed toward a single ideal reader, literate, leisured, interested in being interested. When I think I have satisfied him, I myself am satisfied.”
It looks like she’s found many of those ideal readers! Congratulations, Edith!
