The Binocular Vision Workshop

BinocularVisionCVR_highresPurchase Binocular Vision

Winner of the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
Finalist for the 2011 National Book Award in Fiction

Book Overview

In this sumptuous offering, one of our premier storytellers provides a feast for fiction aficionados. Spanning four decades and three prize-winning collections, these 21 vintage selected stories and 13 scintillating new ones take us around the world, from Jerusalem to Central America, from tsarist Russia to London during the Blitz, from central Europe to Manhattan, and from the Maine coast to Godolphin, Massachusetts, a fictional suburb of Boston. These charged locales, and the lives of the endlessly varied characters within them, are evoked with a tenderness and incisiveness found in only our most observant seers.

No matter the situation in which her characters find themselves—an unforeseen love affair between adolescent cousins, a lifetime of memories unearthed by an elderly couple’s decision to shoplift, the deathbed secret of a young girl’s forbidden forest tryst with the tsar, the danger that befalls a wealthy couple’s child in a European inn of misfits—Edith Pearlman conveys their experience with wit and aplomb, with relentless but clear-eyed optimism, and with a supple prose that reminds us, sentence by sentence, page by page, of the gifts our greatest verbal innovators can bestow.

Binocular Vision reveals a true American original, a master of the story, showing us, with her classic sensibility and lasting artistry, the cruelties, the longings, and the rituals that connect human beings across space and time.

Thank you for choosing Eckleburg. We are so happy to have you with us! If you have friends who are looking to focus on their writing now, encourage them to join us, too! This is a free self-serve workshop. If you would like to work with a faculty member on your fiction, essays, poetry and more while receiving individualized readings and feedback, check out our group workshops including Short Story I and II, Short Short Fiction, Novel I, II, III, Personal Essay and more at Online Workshops.

 

Meet the Author

Edith Pearlman’s fiction has won three O. Henry Prizes and has appeared three times in Best American Short Stories, twice in The Pushcart Prize, and once in New Stories from the South. She is the author of three previous story collections: Vaquita (winner of the Drue Heinz Prize for Literature), Love Among the Greats (winner of the Spokane Fiction Award), and How to Fall (winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize). She lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

 

Goals

  • To identify, read and view exemplary works of fiction with a focus on the short story form;
  • To generate new drafts of work with a focus on short story, narrative-focused and minimalist craft;
  • To help you further strengthen your knowledge of form and to provide you with the environment to better understand your individual voice so you can apply this to future works;
  • To help you learn and improve on the techniques of writing and self-editing so that you are aware of your preferred forms and boundaries and be able to consider how you might push your preferred forms into your best craft.