Venus in the Afternoon

The short stories in this rich debut collection embody in their complexity Alice Munro's description of the short story as "a world seen in a quick, glancing light."In chiseled and elegant prose, Lieberman conjures wildly disparate worlds.A middle aged window washer, mourning his wife and an estranged daughter, begins to grow attached to a young woman he sees through the glass; a writer, against his better judgment, pursues a new relationship with a femme fatale who years ago broke his heart; and the daughter of a Holocaust survivor struggles with the delicate decision of whether to finally ask her aging mother how it was that she survived.It is all here-the exigencies of love, of lust, the raw, unlit terrain of grief.Whether plumbing the darker depths or casting a humorous eye on a doomed relationship, these stories never force a choice between tragedy and redemption, but rather invite us into the private moments and crucibles of lives as hungry and flawed as our own.