Selected by Joanna Scott as the winner of the 2003 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, Edith Pearlman's How to Fall is a darkly humorous, deeply observant collection that welcomes the world's immense variety with confidence. The intense staff of an intense restaurant, a mother and daughter unfashionably enmeshed, a scholar whose passion is awakened by a message in a language he doesn't understand -- these characters are the subjects of Pearlman's cool, studied focus, each rendered with such unpredictable intricacy that they often astonish themselves just as much as the reader. Many of stories either begin or wind their way back to a mythical, two-by-three-mile Massachusetts town --Godolphin, a place that "called itself a town but was really a leafy wedge of Boston."

In the title story we meet Jocelyn Hoyle, a comic sidekick in an early 1950s television variety show. Like so many clowns, he is miserable. The tale opens when he begins to receive mysterious letters from a fan who calls herself The Lady In Green. It ends with a poignant, surprising twist. In "The Large Lady" a disgruntled "crusader against famine" gives an unseemly speech at an affluent party in Godolphin. In "If Love Were All" a woman of fifty leaves her home in Rhode Island to help refugee children in World War II London. There she endures bombings, betrayals, and the unsettling beginnings of peace. Spanning four countries and sixty years, these sixteen stories present characters dealing with love and death and other perplexities: how to live after resurrection, how to sell a diamond on the black market, how to say good-bye to your face.


Edith Pearlman manages to combine subtlety with extravagance, understatement with spectacle, drawing our focus to the eccentricities of those who would prefer to remain unnoticed.... Confronted with unexpected obstacles, these characters exchange the blurring comfort of routine with spontaneity and improvisation. They fall in love. They fall to pieces. They make secret sacrifices. They take daring risks. They wonder if they have lived justly, fully, completely.... Full of vivid, intricate, nuanced portraits, confidently focused, restrained and yet spirited, saturated with a powerful imaginative sympathy, How to Fall is a remarkable collection by a remarkable writer.
-From the Foreword by Joanna Scott