Love Among the Greats — Edith Pearlman

Edith Pearlman's characters in this collection of stories are children, old women, young men, rabbis, toy makers, lovers, invalids, immigrants, schmoozers, angels, and fools; all perfectly real and accessible, all drawn with a kind of comic quietude.

The title story begins: "At the dinner following Michael's wedding to Bellamy they did the chair thing. It was a Jewish wedding, after all--as Jewish as a wedding could be when the bride's mother was not Jewish and therefore the bride, strictly speaking, was not Jewish either; as Jewish as a wedding could be in a prairie college town where the one synagogue, struggling to keep solvent, rented itself out weekdays to Alcoholics Anonymous and a quilting group."

Winner of the first annual Spokane Prize for Fiction, Love Among the Greats is a magnificent world tour of characters, tones, and fictional structures, all of them brought to life with a stunning restraint.