Joan Silber Books in Order

Expecting her first child in 1940, Rhoda Taber anticipates a secure life with her dependable husband in suburban New Jersey. Death, illness and her daughters’ conflicting personalities gradually disrupt her assumptions about family, comfort and control.

Pauline moves from New Jersey to 1920s Greenwich Village seeking artistic freedom and independence. Poverty, difficult lovers and the disappointments of bohemian life force her to reconsider what it means to make a life of her own.

These stories follow people whose assumptions about their lives are unsettled by unexpected choices and desires. A lesbian couple adopts a biracial child, an ex-stripper considers life without sex, and familiar identities give way to uncertain possibilities.

Young artist Elisa falls in love with Gabe, a quiet former drug dealer more than twenty years her senior. As they plan to marry, consequences from their separate pasts threaten the future their unlikely partnership has promised.

Interconnected stories move from contemporary America and France to Renaissance Italy and China during the Boxer Rebellion. Dancers, missionaries and other searching souls pursue love and faith, revealing how private longings echo across distant lives.

Linked lives stretch across Vietnam, Thailand, Mexico, Sicily and America as travelers and immigrants encounter unfamiliar worlds. Love, family loyalty and cultural misunderstanding reshape their ideas of belonging and expose the distance between intention and experience.

Joan Silber examines how the passage and arrangement of time shape fiction. Drawing on writers including Fitzgerald, Achebe and Roy, she explains five approaches to narrative duration and considers how a story’s ending determines its meaning.

An activist’s daughter, an adulterous traveler and other connected characters struggle to live by their beliefs. Moving between New York, India and Paris, these stories explore idealism, deception and the personal costs of trying to become better.

Single mother Reyna withdraws from her boyfriend’s cigarette-smuggling scheme to protect her young son. That decision sets off consequences for relatives and strangers, linking intimate choices to unexpected loss and possibilities for generosity.

New York lawyer Ethan discovers that his father has maintained another family in Queens. As both households respond, overlapping relationships and journeys abroad reveal how love, money and divided loyalties shape their separate searches for happiness.

A disastrous encounter with heroin in 1970s New York leaves Ivan burdened by his decision to abandon his friend Eddie. Across subsequent decades, that moment reverberates through their families and communities, raising difficult questions about responsibility and forgiveness.