A Lover's Question: Selected Stories

Thomas Farber's works of fiction, creative nonfiction, and the epigrammatic reveal him as a writer charting the voyage of his generation with luminous, scrupulous integrity. Anatomist, ironist, and moralist, he achieves large effects with deceptively simple means. Such elegant economy, unsentimental but deeply compassionate, compels us to recognize these lives— in and out of love— as our own. The stories selected here, with an introduction by the author, are from Who Wrote the Book of Love? (1977), Hazards to the Human Heart (1980), and Learning to Love It (1993).

Critical Praise

"Stunning...to be reread and remembered with pleasure."

--Chicago Tribune

...quietly devastating. The people in these stories stay with you, and in fact you begin to run into them everywhere you go.

--Rolling Stone

Farber is unafraid of feelings, unafraid of life as it is lived in the heart.

--Newsday

...illuminating intelligence, and as with a faceted stone, the light comes back with the depths clear, true, and sparkling.

--Houston Chronicle

...sharply conceived and brilliantly executed... his prose is as spare and specifying as black-and-white photography...His gift is real.

--The Nation