‟Roxana Robinson’s first collection of stories is at once poignant and brutal, a book of New York stories filled with the bitter joys and tender sorrows of marriage and parenthood.
A Glimpse of Scarlet
In the tradition of John Cheever, Roxana Robinson charts the hidden realities beneath the serene and gleaming surface of old-guard WASP family life.
Taking readers into the summer homes, town houses, and boarding schools of those for whom power and wealth come as a birthright, she uncovers an astonishing emotional territory.
Here, in the first collection of her short fiction, Robinson probes the pain and joy of raising children, the allure of illicit love, the ordeal of divorce, as well as more subtle events—the small but often exquisitely painful betrayals that litter the course of a life.
But in her world, grace too can be near at hand, and Robinson balances these harrowing portraits with stories that uncover the possibility of reunion and renewal—and moments of transcendent loveliness that promise, and deliver, “merely great delight.”
- Named Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times
‟Fourteen finely wrought and revealing stories about the not-so-gentle sting of WASP-y love, from novelist (Summer Light) and biographer (Georgia O’Keeffe) Robinson.
‟A touchingly intimate, human collection.
‟’nce people like these were the focus of Henry James and Edith Wharton: in recent years Louis Auchincloss and John Cheever have been their chroniclers. Robinson shows similar mastery of form, and she belongs in their august company.