Winner of the first annual Spokane Prize for Fiction, Love Among the Greats is a magnificent world tour of characters, tones, and fictional structures, all of them brought with a stunning restraint and clarity reminiscent of Joyce's Dubliners.

Edith Pearlman's characters are children, old women, young men, rabbis, toy makers, lovers, invalids, immigrants, schmoozers, angels, and fools; all of them perfectly real and accessible, all of them drawn with a kind of comic quietude that only excellent writers can sustain.

The title story begins: "At the dinner following Michal's wedding to Bellamy they did the chair thing. It was a Jewish wedding, after all-as Jewish as a wedding could be when the bride's mother was not Jewish and therefore the bride, strictly speaking, was not Jewish either; as Jewish as a wedding could be in a prairie college town where the one synagogue, struggling to keep solvent, rented itself out weekdays to Alcoholics Anonymous and a quilting group."

Readers are going to love these polished and unusual stories.