Customer Reviews

Swimming Lessons

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Marci Stillerman is a superb writer. These stories are sometimes fullsome, mostly spare, and always pithy, textured, and cutting to the heart of things. Intensely moving. Masterful. Wow!

Marci Stillerman's short story collection, Swimming Lessons, is not only remarkable for its spare, intuitive style, but for the sheer scope and diversity of subject matter. The reader begins to wonder how such a panorama of characters, settings and themes can come from one mind, and by the last story, we are left thinking, what a mind! What insight into the human condition!

The characters in Swimming Lessons offer a full spectrum of gender, age, race, class and culture. Welfare mothers and waitresses, a successful lesbian author, the homeless, the mentally impaired, middle class families in varying degrees of dysfunction, a young Jewish girl struggling to determine her own future, a homosexual soldier facing the horrors of war. The orthodox versus unorthodox throughout.

Then, when we think we've covered every possibility, some of her most powerful stories are about animals, a German shepherd defying his Nazi training, a mother polar bear protecting her cub, a reddish stray dog trying to heal a family. Through her masterful use of detail, it all works.

Swimming Lessons is the perfect title, for in Marci Stillerman's impressive work, we indeed swim in all the wayward currents of life.

- Kathryn Jordan, Author of HOT WATER A Novel - Berkley/Penguin, 2006