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 forc...
She needed blood, they gave her blood, and the blood was poisoned. She died with a stranger’s germs cruising through her veins at a startling rate. The baby, a girl, lived. Her husband cared for the baby and in time remarried. Her father kept in close touch with his son-in-law, and took the baby ...
In the hospital a realization had crept up on me insidiously like a mouse in the dark, a mouse whose presence you suspect, yet who you hope will never appear. I was responsible for the survival of this creature. It was paralyzing. Who the creature was in relation to me, my body, was a riddle: no ...
“You were perfect, when you first came out,” my mother insisted. But between the moment of my birth and her next inspection I suffered an injury to my right eye. How it occurred is a mystery. Some blunder made in handling was all she would murmur—drops, doctors, nurses, vagueness: “These things ...
He was in charge of the instruments for the junior orchestra, seeing that they were kept in good condition and got put away properly. He was the secretary of the student government and kept meticulous minutes of the bimonthly meetings, spiced by a playful but never nasty wit directed at the self-...