Marisa Silver

Responding to the fractured relationships of the adults around them, two young girls - one wild and reckless with a fierce imagination and one polite and cautious - engage in increasingly dangerous play and find their lives shattered in a single, unthinkable moment.

In an unnamed country at the beginning of the last century, a child called Pavla is born to peasant parents. Her arrival, fervently anticipated and conceived in part by gypsy tonics and archaic prescriptions, stuns her parents and brings outrage and scorn from her community. Pavla has been born a dwarf, beautiful in face, but as the years pass, she grows no farther than the edge of her crib. When her parents turn to the treatments of a local charlatan,...

An indelible collection of eight stories that mine the complexities of familial relationships and the surprising ways love manifests itself in our lives. In Alone with you, we emphasize as her brilliantly etched characters--a VA hospital nurse's aide numbed by her surroundings, a distant father saddled with care of his developmentally-challenged daughter following the death of his wife, a woman accompanying her mother, dying of cancer, to an alternative...