Wolff, Tobias - Perry Glasser (review date December 1985)
Perry Glasser (review date December 1985)
SOURCE: Glasser, Perry. “Reading in Love.” North American Review 270, no. 4 (December 1985): 76-7.
[In the following review, Glasser praises Back in the World for its candor and poignancy.]
Reading a good short story is like falling in love. Some quirk, some strangeness, some difference, piques your attention. That difference becomes enchanting. You smile at it, wondering briefly how it could come to be, but not caring really because it has the charm of novelty, so you go with it, lingering a bit longer out of interest and bemused curiosity. Then you begin to become aware of imperfections. There's a wart of self-consciousness here, a compulsion to melodrama there, a neurotic insistence on a world view that because it does not match your own seems perverse and wrong-headed. If the story is truly seductive, you overlook those flaws and try to accept the story for what it is. You go...
[The entire page is 1746 words long]
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