Ideas of Heaven

By: Joan Silber

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Paperback | 1 November 2022

At a Glance

Paperback
256 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
2.1 x 12.9 x 19.6

Paperback

$24.99

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Set in France, Italy, New York and China, in the past and present, this National Book Award-shortlisted title examines notions of the divine.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

Set in modern-day America and France, Renaissance Italy and Boxer Rebellion China, these stories embrace whole lifetimes, much in the manner of Alice Munro and William Trevor. Joan Silber skilfully and subtly ties one story to the next, as a minor element in one becomes a major element in the next, until the last is tied convincingly to the first. Intense in subject yet restrained in tone, they are about longings - often held for years - and the ways in which sex and religion can become parallel forms of dedication and comfort.

From a wannabe dancer in contemporary New York City to missionaries in China, Ideas of Heaven showcases Joan Silber's extraordinary deftness as she illuminates love, faith and sex with great originality and profundity.

'Joan Silber renders the thirsts and devotions of six lives with clarifying exactitude. The sometimes gentle, sometimes raw connections between these people will move you, and the ardour with which they yearn for their respective heavens will break your heart. ' - Anthony Doerr

Industry Reviews

'Joan Silber renders the thirsts and devotions of six lives with clarifying exactitude. The sometimes gentle, sometimes raw connections between these people will move you, and the ardour with which they yearn for their respective heavens will break your heart. ' - Anthony Doerr

'[There are] books whose pieces are linked not by mere repetition of the protagonist but by genuine artfulness and imaginative necessity: Joan Silber's splendid new Ideas of Heaven, for example, in which the smallest wisp of one story will, in the next, sometimes blaze to full, unexpected life.' - New York Times Book Review

'Love, like these beautiful stories, offers devotion, consolation and transcendence.' - Boston Globe

'Luminous, stunning...The stories gather wholeness through deepening meditations on devotion...and through the startling use of language.' - Chicago Tribune

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