Lynne Sharon Schwartz – författare

A Los Angeles Times Book Review Best Book of 1996''Without books how could I have become myself?'' In this wonderfully written meditation, Lynne Sharon Schwartz offers deeply felt insight into why we read and how what we read shapes our lives. An enchanting celebration of the printed word.From the Trade Paperback edition.

"One marvels at the force of seeing in Schwartz's No Way Out But Through and cannot help but feel a particular gratitude for her abundant humor. Go all in with these poems; you'll reap unknown rewards. She possesses a quick-witted imagination that sanctifies memories and makes room for the wondrous nature of our cosmopolitan lights." —Major Jackson

The Fatigue Artist is a refreshingly candid story about life, love, and survival in the contemporary world. A writer living in New York City, Laura is overwhelmed by a mysterious lethargy and retreats to her bed where she reflects on the loves and losses of her recent past and seeks the cure to her perplexing tiredness. Fortified by the Eastern teachings of her Tai Chi instructor and the nurturing attentions of friends and a acupuncturist, Laura crawls out of her somnambulism with intelligent determination in search of peace and resurrection. The Fatigue Artist is both a moving chronicle of a woman''s search for meaning and a wry depiction of modern urban life.

The arithmetic of marriage is never easy to understand—as time passes, the variables constantly changeCaroline is set adrift in 1950s Rome when she meets Ivan. Though things start slowly, Ivan wins her over after a strong pursuit, and the two marry, agreeing never to inflict any “irreparable wounds.” But though Ivan proves to be a fine father, he is a distant husband, and Caroline finds herself daydreaming of other men. So as the years pass, the couple finds ways to bend but not break their cardinal rule. Rough Strife, the first novel from Lynne Sharon Schwartz, was nominated for the National Book Foundation Award. In this sensational debut, Schwartz depicts a marriage that grows painfully into the modern era, despite the changes—both political and personal—that challenge it.

Retirement doesn’t spell the end after all, in this rousing journey through loss and rebirthMax has lived a long and fulfilling life. He and his wife were star trapeze artists and acrobats in the Brandon Brothers circus. But with her passing, he’s left alone in New York, and suffers a heart attack after a terrifying mugging. Without family to fall back on, Max is forced to leave his beloved Manhattan for a rest home in Westchester. He fears it will be the end of him—but in this stirring novel, retirement means a new beginning. In Westchester, Max meets Lettie, a kind widow, and the rambunctious and intelligent Alison, her daughter. And through a new gig teaching juggling and stunts at a local middle school, and new relationships with unexpected allies in the boring suburbs, Max discovers that it’s never too late to have a fresh start.

“A more-than-welcome return to a classic idea of the novel . . . A wonder to read” (Los Angeles Times Book Review).  The field is all around us. It’s our needs and our wants. This is what George tells Lydia. A disturbance, however, is something that keeps us from grasping and attaining the things we need. Usually, we can adapt to these disturbances and move forward. But, what happens if a disturbance becomes too great to move past? In this entrancing tale of loss and understanding, acclaimed author Lynne Sharon Schwartz plots the course of a woman’s life, through the cycles of love, loss, and acceptance. Lydia’s early life is marked by calm constants: a house in Cape Cod, a philosophy group in college. These remain her touchstones as she becomes a busy wife, mother, and music teacher. But when her family’s world is suddenly shattered, she struggles to regain her equilibrium. Will she be able to find her way in such a radically altered field?

A rich and diverse collection of stories detailing life in all its daily battles and yearnings Lynne Sharon Schwartz is a master of tone, deft at creating realistic settings and characters. In Acquainted with the Night, she unleashes sixteen wickedly smart, wholly believable short stories. In the title story, for instance, a man’s nocturnal battle against a floating globule in his eye forces him to question his very state of being. In “Mrs. Saunders Writes to the World,” an anonymous old woman attempts to force people to know her first name by writing “FRANNY” in big red letters all over her neighborhood. In another, a girl must to deal with the increasingly juvenile actions of her divorced mother. By turns darkly humorous, moving, and witty, Acquainted with the Night demonstrates Schwartz’s genius for detail.

A dynamic collection of stories that portrays different generations and explores various genres with compassion and dry witIn The Melting Pot, nothing is ever what it seems. In these short stories from critically acclaimed author Lynne Sharon Schwartz, characters grapple with the desires and needs of daily life, no matter how absurd or mundane. In the title story, a woman finally reveals her tangled family history to her widowed lover. In another tale, an ageing womanizer undergoes more than just a midlife crisis. In “So You’re Going to Have a New Body!” a woman experiences a surreal surgical sterilization. The Melting Pot demonstrates Schwartz’s many talents coalescing into a determined and striking whole.

With a reader's perspective and a master writer's skill, critically acclaimed novelist Lynne Sharon Schwartz takes on the world at largeCommunication, while essential, is almost impossible to maintain perfectly a truism Lynne Sharon Schwartz demonstrates in this stunning essay collection. In one section, she discovers that one typo could completely derail a project while translating an Italian account of the Holocaust. In another essay, she deconstructs our dependence on the telephone. Most movingly, she details the ways that friendship can grow in the most unlikely places, and how difficult those bonds can be to maintain. In a previous collection of essays, Ruined by Reading, Schwartz took on the world of literature, writing, and books. Now, Schwartz extends her focus while continuing to explore her subject honestly and forcefully.

Everyone has a face that they show to the outside world—but our thoughts, fears, and perversions lie just beneath“Referred pain” describes the sensation of pain, not at the actual point of injury, but somewhere else in the body. This disorientation of the senses is felt, in one way or another, by many of the characters in this collection from Lynne Sharon Schwartz, one of America’s foremost chroniclers of contemporary life. In the title novella, a son of Holocaust survivors circumvents his discomfort over his parents’ history through a Kafkaesque series of dental procedures. In another story, a professor’s sexual attraction to one of his students leads him down a twisted path of misplaced identity. Laced with Schwartz’s satirical, acidly intelligent wit, Referred Pain displays the peak of her ability.

The emotionally realistic and elegant portrait of mourning in the days and months following 9/11As Renata, a linguist for the New York City Public Library, crosses the Brooklyn Bridge on her way to work one morning, she looks up to see a flash of orange and blue. Two planes have hit the World Trade Center, and with that, her world changes entirely. Renata’s connection to the tragedy grows deeper as her boyfriend, an overzealous social worker, begins to take care of a baby orphaned by the attacks. And then she meets a mute teenage girl in the rubble of the Twin Towers who may or may not be her long lost niece—a family connection as tenuous as it is painful. The winner of New York magazine’s Best Literary Fiction award in 2005, this novel evocatively represents the forms of grief in the wake of major trauma.

Ever since the explorations of Marco Polo and the travels of Montaigne, a lively dialogue has persisted about the pros and cons of travel. Lynne Sharon Schwartz joins this dialogue with a memoir that raises both serious and amusing questions about travel, using her own experiences as vivid illustrations.Not Now, Voyager takes us on a voyage of self-discovery as the author traces how travel has shaped her sensibilities from childhood through adulthood. She makes an adolescent visit to Miami Beach, where she confronts the powerful sensation of not belonging; she goes to Rome as a young woman and ponders the difference between ignorance and innocence; she ventures to Jamaica and witnesses political and social unrest; and she takes a family road trip to Montreal and watches her daughters come to startling realizations of their own.Schwartz’s personal history takes on new shapes, and her feelings about travel change as she shows us who she started out as and who she has become. Above all, this memoir exemplifies a mode of travel in and of itself: the mind on a journey or quest, pausing here and there, sometimes by design, sometimes by serendipity, lingering, occasionally backtracking, but always on the move.

When German author W. G. Sebald died in a car accident at the age of fifty-seven, the literary world mourned the loss of a writer whose oeuvre it was just beginning to appreciate. Through published interviews with and essays on Sebald, award-winning translator and author Lynne Sharon Schwartz offers a profound portrait of the writer, who has been praised posthumously for his unflinching explorations of historical cruelty, memory, and dislocation. With contributions from poet, essayist, and translator Charles Simic, New Republic editor Ruth Franklin, Bookworm radio host Michael Silverblatt, and more, The Emergence of Memory offers Sebald’s own voice in interviews between 1997 up to a month before his death in 2001. Also included are cogent accounts of almost all of Sebald’s books, thematically linked to events in the contributors’ own lives.Contributors include Carole Angier, Joseph Cuomo, Ruth Franklin, Michael Hofmann, Arthur Lubow, Tim Parks, Michael Silverblatt, Charles Simic, and Eleanor Wachtel.

In Joyce Carol Oates’s story “The Translation,” a traveler to an Eastern European country falls in love with a woman he gets to know through an interpreter. In Lydia Davis’s “French Lesson I: Le Meurtre,” what begins as a lesson in beginner’s French takes a sinister turn. In the essay “On Translating and Being Translated,” Primo Levi addresses the joys and difficulties awaiting the translator. Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Crossing Borders: Stories and Essays About Translation gathers together thirteen stories and five essays that explore the compromises, misunderstandings, traumas, and reconciliations we act out and embody through the art of translation. Guiding her selection is Schwartz’s marvelous eye for finding hidden gems, bringing together Levi, Davis, and Oates with the likes of Michael Scammell, Harry Mathews, Chana Bloch, and so many other fine and intriguing voices.

Two-Part Inventions begins when Suzanne, a concert pianist, dies suddenly of a stroke in the New York City apartment she shares with her producer husband Philip. Rather than mourn in peace, Philip becomes deeply paranoid: their life is based on a fraud and the acclaimed music the couple created is about to be exposed. Philip had built a career for his wife by altering her recordings, taking a portion of a song here and there, from recordings of other pianists. Syncing the alterations seamlessly, he created a piece of flawless music with Suzanne getting sole credit.In this urban, psychological novel, author Lynne Sharon Schwartz brilliantly guides the reader through a flawed marriage and calculated career. Beginning with Suzanne’s death and moving backwards in time, Schwartz examines their life together, and her remarkable career, while contemplating the nature of truth, marriage and the pursuit of perfection.

In this collection of impeccably written essays, Schwartz tells us early on that she never thought of her life as a “continuous line” but rather a series of intertwined interrupted experiences.Hers is a life that has been bumped, tumbled, and smoothed by an endless stream of travel, fascinating people, and books: writing them, pondering them, translating them. Her essays range from musings about the art of translation, the tribulations of major surgery dissected with biting wit, a quest for recovery from the 9 /11 attacks at a music school, and hours spent with friends arguing, drinking and smoking in a neighborhood bar. Her personal narratives range from humorous childhood (an 8-year-old writer) and troubled revelations to learning to be an adult facing the difficulties of simultaneously writing and raising children. We see her as a daughter struggling to understand her parents through adolescent eyes, a mother startled at the all-consuming demands of motherhood and writing, and as an older adult grappling with mortality. Throughout, she is painfully honest, funny, and unafraid of difficult truths. Relentlessly candid, subjecting herself to her own sharp scrutiny, Schwartz is willing to confront the confusions of maturing in a changing world.

Santino lives in Palermo, Sicily - a region of Italy dominated by the Mafia. When his father and grandfather lack the money for Santino's first-communion party, they carry out a theft. After witnessing the murders of his father and grandfather, Santino makes a daring escape from the city. Now he's left with a choice: cooperate with police and risk his life, or maintain the code of silence. Inspired by real-life events, Silvana Gandolfi's In the Line of Fire is a gripping, unforgettable story of young people's courage to do the right thing when faced with the harsh realities of the adult world.