Tale for the Mirror: A Novella and Other Stories

Hortense Calisher

sept 2013 · Open Road Media

Acerca de este libro electrónico

DIVHortense Calisher delivers another collection of provocative prose, on par with that of Henry James and John Updike/divDIV/divDIV
A novella plus twelve short vignettes, Tale for the Mirror demonstrates Hortense Calisher’s masterful use of language in an exploration of the human condition. In the title novella, a suburban man in the Hudson River Valley analyzes his life and discovers the importance of stories after a sage Indian mystic moves into his neighborhood./divDIV
Laced with wit and pathos, the evocative shorter pieces include the galvanizing “The Scream on Fifty-seventh Street,” a textured tale of a widow who overhears an incident outside her window, compelling her to solve a mystery while coming to terms with her own loneliness in an unsentimental city. “The Rehabilitation of Ginevra Leake” is the farcical story of a homely girl from a proper Southern family who finds a home in the Communist party. In “The Seacoast of Bohemia,” a successful Manhattan man comes to terms with the fact that he’ll never have children./div
Tale for the Mirror peers into private lives with precision and perception, as only Hortense Calisher could. 

Acerca del autor

DIVHortense Calisher (1911–2009) was born in New York City. The daughter of a young German-Jewish immigrant mother and a somewhat older Jewish father from Virginia, she graduated from Barnard College in 1932 and worked as a sales clerk before marrying and moving to Nyack, New York, to raise her family. Her first book, a collection of short stories titled In the Absence of Angels, appeared in 1951. She went on to publish two dozen more works of fiction and memoir, writing into her nineties.A past president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of PEN, the worldwide association of writers, she was a National Book Award finalist three times, won an O. Henry Award for “The Night Club in the Woods” and the 1986 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for The Bobby Soxer, and was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in 1952 and 1955. /div