Awake in the Dark: Stories - Hardcover

Nayman, Shira

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743292685 ISBN 13: 9780743292689

Publisher: Scribner, 2006

Synopsis

"Shira Nayman's stories risk strong emotion and always clear the sentimental. Her sentences have heft and spine and grace, and her vision is clear and generous."

-- Mary Gordon, author of Pearl and Spending

"Shira Nayman's stories risk strong emotion and always clear the sentimental. Her sentences have heft and spine and grace, and her vision is clear and generous."

-- Mary Gordon, author of Pearl and Spending

About this title

About the Author:

Shira Nayman grew up in Australia. She has a master's degree in comparative literature and a doctorate in clinical psychology, and has worked as a psychologist and a marketing consultant. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including The Atlantic Monthly, The Georgia Review, New England Review, and Boulevard. The recipient of two grants from the Australia Council for the Arts Literature Board, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children.

From Publishers Weekly:

Nayman's debut collection sees the children of Holocaust victims and participants coming to terms with family secrets. In "The House on Kronenstrasse," a middle-aged New Yorker is drawn to her childhood home in Heidelberg, where she discovers a devastating secret about who she is. In "The Porcelain Monkey," a young woman's discovery of a dreidel in a keepsake box prompts her father, who was a German soldier during WWII, to tell her about its origin; the truth inspires her to become an Orthodox Jew. In "The Lamp," a daughter who has never learned that she is the product of a Nazi rape makes peace with the fact that she will never know her mother's past: "Perhaps," she muses, "there are graves that must be dug if the living are to go on living." And in the novella "Dark Urgings of the Blood," a psychiatrist is haunted by a patient whose history eerily parallels her own. Nayman, a clinical psychologist, writes in a didactic tone that makes these stories read like earnest moral essays on already heavily covered themes. Still, her edifying lessons will appeal to readers looking for insight on the tortured choices imposed by Nazism. (Oct.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0743292685
• ISBN 13: 9780743292689
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304