There are two sets of tracks, coextensive. Outbound in this case means away from the center of the city, he said. Joanna was bending over Lily’s stroller, adjusting the child’s harness. When the family got off at the Harvard Square station she frowned at a platform sign. Saying something backward made it easy to remember, sealed it in. Then she read the names from the bottom up. ON THE SUBWAY Sophie recited the list of stations like a poem. My favorite is "Allog", about a Filipino newcomer who becomes indispensable to the wary residents of an Israeli apartment building. Each story is so finely tuned that it's next to impossible to put this collection down until all have been read. A little lost girl in Harvard Square refugees and immigrants the delivery of a Torah from a destroyed Czech village to a midwestern temple shoplifting affairs conducted and affairs resisted deaths by disease and, most remarkably, a suicide so vividly described that one might assume that the author had lived through it. All 34 stories are told by women or girls, or by women when they were girls, encompassing inner layers and outer occurrences in perfect proportion, and some even conclude with pleasing surprises and stunning shocks. The short stories in this collection are such perfectly observed, concise, humane gems that she can be comfortably compared to the renowned queen of the genre, Alice Munro. Edith Pearlman, a relatively obscure Brookline, MA author, just died a few weeks ago at age 86.
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