Literary Birthday – 14 June – Joan Silber

Happy Birthday, Joan Silber, born on 14 June 1945.

Joan Silber Quotes

1. Slowed time is — or should be — a way of pointing to what’s important.
2. This is fictional time, where events play out and possibilities are exhausted, so that meaning can emerge.
3. If you saw through everything, it made it hard to figure out what to do with yourself.
4. A story depends on things not standing still, on the built-in condition of impermanence.
5. A story is entirely determined by what portion of time it chooses to narrate.

Joan Silber is an American novelist and short story writer. She is the author of ten books of fiction. Her first book, the novel Household Words, won the PEN/Hemingway Award. She won a PEN/Hemingway Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 2017 for Improvement. Other works include Fools: Stories and Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories. She’s also the author of The Art of Time in Fiction. Her most recent book is Mercy. She lives in New York and taught for many years at Sarah Lawrence College and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Visit joansilber.net.

Source for image: Author’s Website with permission. Photo by Shari Diamond

by Amanda Patterson

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