Rating: 
Summary: Spirituality, Love and Longing
Review: These six sometimes connected stories set around the globe are simple, eloquent, and touching in their honest revelations about matters of the heart. Told in first person narratives Joan Silber creates a series of unique voices, some with heartbreaking circumstances, all with hope and faith. A particular favorite of mine is the title story, where a family of missionaries moves to China to spread the Gospel of the Lord. Slight enough to read at one prolonged sitting, it's cumulative effect is strong enough to make you catch your breath.
Rating:
Summary: An extraordinarily wise and gripping work of fiction
Review: This "circle of stories" manages to capture more of human life than a dozen novels. I think it's the depths of the characterization. Like Alice Munro, Joan Silber makes you feel that you know these people better than anyone in real life, and sympathize with them, understand them, and care for them as if they were real.The characters and situations in one story resonate in another: a woman who longs to be a dancer -- without the equipment to go past a certain point -- is cruelly humilated by her teacher. But then, when we get to his story, we see how and why he has become the person who could do this. The book ranges across time and place, connecting through names, themes, story elements, and the ways the characters' erotic and spiritual longings intertwine. I finished the book a week ago and can't stop thinking about it. I thought it was one of the best works of fiction I'd ever read, both deep and dazzling. It hasn't faded for me at all; if anything, my admiration has grown. This makes me understand why readers want to follow a writer around and ask, "What do you eat for breakfast? How many hours a day do you write? Do you do your first drafts on a computer or by hand? How many times did you rewrite these magical stories?" As if there were some formula whereby the writer could communicate to the reader her wisdom, her humor, her compassion. Here's a moment where we see a character angrily sinking into failure: "In the end I gave up the studio, gave up the whole idea of teaching. I got a job in an agency booking dancers for clubs. Go-go girls, in spangled underwear and little white boots. I was the man the girls talked to after they read the classified and came into the office, nervous and flushed or tough and scowling. I sent them to clubs in the outer boroughs, airless caves in the Bronx with speakers blaring disco and red lights on the catwalk. My temper was so bad that people did what I told them, which was the agency's idea of sterling job performance. I was a snarling jerk in those years. Contempt filled by every cell; I was that as a tick on contempt." Oddly enough, though there's nothing resembling advice in here, after reading this book, I feel as if I know more about how to live, how to be the person I wish I could be. Anyway, I'm looking forward to reading these again and have given copies to two friends already. I just wish I could read it again for the first time, for the shocks of discovery.
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