Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Schwartz's second collection of poems goes beyond her first, In Solitary in its range of emotion, form, and content. Poet Amy Gerstler says, "Her poetic voice has a lovely admixture of gravitas and glee in confronting human hungers, foibles, and ambivalences. Schwartz is whip smart, witty, stalwart, hopeful, multivalent, philosophical but never stuffy."

This idiosyncratic memoir takes the reader on a voyage of self-discovery, as the author traces how travel has shaped her sensibilities from childhood through adulthood. Schwartz's personal history takes on new shapes, and her feelings about travel change as she shows who she started out as and who she has become. Above all, the book illustrates a mode of travel in and of itself: the mind on a journey or quest, passing here and there, sometimes by design, sometimes by serendipity, lingering, occasionally backtracking, but always on the move.

Lynne Schwartz has collected and edited the most penetrating interviews with and essays on W.G. Sebald, to form an unusual portrait of the novelist. Sebald's work, meditative and brooding on history, first appeared in the US in 1996 and was immediately hailed by critics. He died in a car accident in 2001. Lynne Schwartz was one of his admirers and presents new aspects of him in these chosen interviews.

Audrey is born with a wandering eye that alters the shapes of the actual world. Growing up in the sheltered atmosphere of postwar Brooklyn, she uses her double vision to create her own reality. Her quest to escape social and family pressures leads to an erotic encounter and an adult perspective.

Lydia Rowe is a chamber music pianist married to an artist. After some turbulent years, the hard-won harmony of their family life is shattered by a tragic event. Disturbances in the Field explores loss and broken faith, the disconnect between expectations and reality. What endures when everything is in flux?

"An intimate story of many kinds of love... in the emotionally unsettled days after September 11. New York City in all its variety is a character, and so is language, which... turns out... more capable of expressing our subtlest thoughts and feelings than we might have guessed."

In this exploration of her lifelong reading habit, Schwartz interweaves her Brooklyn childhood with vivid memories of books that led to self-discovery. "All the reading I did as I child..., sitting on the bed while darkness fell around me, was an act of reclamation.... This was the way to make my life my own."

This intergenerational comedy, blending satire and sympathy, is "a small masterpiece--a witty, loving, totally believable novel of the way a typically atypical family lives now. Lynne Sharon Schwartz is the Jane Austen of urban America at century's end." Dan Wakefield.

The varied stories in "Referred Pain"--ranging from the domestic to the supernatural--subert the conventions of realism with an outrageousness that mixes tragedy with black humor. Booklist says, "Never before has Schwartz so fully disclosed both her incisive use of language and penetrating understanding of the human psyche."

Ori's Sherman's luminous and whimsical paintings of animals enacting the Passover story and enjoying the ritual Seder make this retelling especially appealing to children. The text is lucid and vivid, in a way that makes children eager to learn more. Split-frame pictures can be read upside down as well.