Learning to Love It: Seven Stories and a Novella

Thomas Farber's previous books of fiction and creative nonfiction reveal him as a writer charting the turbulent voyage of the Sixties generation--and his personal obsessions--with scrupulous integrity and a wry, illuminating intelligence. In this new collection, Farber continues to grow with his characters, describing with lyric, elegant economy the often chaotic mysteries threatening to overwhelm them. Utterly unsentimental but deeply compassionate, Thomas Farber compels us to recognize these lives as our own.

Critical Praise

"Mr. Farber at his best...a prolonged meditation on love and loss, the underlying theme of the whole collection...moving and arresting at the same time."

                  --New York Times

"Farber's inclination to direct attention to both the difficulties of representation and the embeddedness of any written portrait in a series of frames makes him a writer's writer...[the stories] meet the challenge with integrity, balanced humor, and a generous heart."

                    --Manoa, A Pacific Journal

The inherent danger in reading Farber's stories is that the reader might mistake his economy for simplicity...Ultimately, Farber's work triumphs; one wonders how he achieves considerable richness and complexity with such sparseness.