Lucky Us

Joan Silber has written a novel both contemporary and timeless about love, its unexpected possibilities and limitations, and about the role of fate in all our lives. Her richly imagined characters and lovely prose make every page of this book a pleasure. (Margot Livesey, author of Criminals)

Lucky Us is a beautiful novel. Elisa and Gabe's story is charged with desperation, tenderness, and compassion. It's a love story of our time, peopled with lively characters and packed with marvelous details. (HA JIN, author of Waiting)

Praise for Joan Silber's previous fiction

Joan Silber writes with wisdom, humor, grace, and wry intelligence.Her characters who lived one life when they were young emerge, after metamorphoses almost Ovidian, bewildered and grateful in another. They bear with them welcome news of how we all survive. (Andrea Barrett)

Silber's prose is a marvel of compression, precision, and tact. (The Philadelphia Inquirer)

Silber} pays tribute to ordinary urban heroes - people who have lived long enough to know that when misfortune shows up, there's no need to make a fuss. She treats dysfunction a bit more gently than Lorrie Moore, with whom she shares a marvelous, perspicacious wit. (The New York Times Book Review

Biography

Silber says that the first story in Ideas of Heaven grew out of an incident someone told her about a dance coach humiliating his female student. The coach's repeated question, "How much do you want it?" suggested, for Silber, the lure of a higher purpose and the religious impulse sometimes embedded in odd places. The story's villain became the protagonist of the next story, and Silber saw that what she really wanted to write about was sex and religion -- "forms of dedication, forms of consolation" -- which she saw often filling in for each other.

Author biography courtesy of the National Book Foundation.

Good To Know

"The title story of Ideas of Heaven is about American missionaries in China, and I based it loosely on a book of letters from a woman sent out in the 1890s by Oberlin College. I visited China just as I was beginning this story, and something quite amazing happened. In a park in Luoyang a man in his 70s began chatting with me in very good, American-accented English. When he heard I was a college professor, he asked if I'd heard of Oberlin College. It turned out he'd been taught by Oberlin missionaries in Shanxi in the 1930s -- a later group of the Congregationalists who were the models for my characters. I couldn't get over the coincidence, though I don't think it seemed astounding to him. His name is Li Xing Ye (he uses Mark Lee in English), and we've written many letters back and forth since then. I sent him a copy of the book and he was very pleased -- he did say it would take him a long time to read it."

"Grace Paley, my first fiction writing teacher, was a crucial influence. She taught me that humor could be a component of serious fiction and that character was always the thing to look at. Her first assignment was to write something in the voice of an actual person you didn't like.

"I've lived in New York my whole adult life, and as Burt Lancaster says in The Sweet Smell of Success, ‘I love this dirty town.' New Yorkers tend to stake their honor on their degree of self-possession -- whining is okay but panicking is not. They don't necessarily succeed in this and can blunder as badly as anywhere, but this is their standard, their own form of cowboy valor. I have to admit that I'm drawn to this sort of urban restraint."

"When my writing career was not going well, I began putting in volunteer time as a Buddy -- a kind of weekly helper -- to a person with AIDS. It turned out to be a totally great thing to do -- it retuned my perspective and expanded what I thought I could do. I'm still doing it eight years later."