Binocular Vision

WEST HARTFORD ― The Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Hartford will present author Edith Pearlman with the 2011 Edward Lewis Wallant Award for her collection of short stories, “Binocular Vision.” The presentation ceremony, which will include a talk by Pearlman and comments from the Wallant Award judges, will be held on Monday, April 23, at 7 p.m. in the university’s 1877 Club.
Admission to the Wallant Award presentation ceremony is free and open to the public, but reservations are required.
“Binocular Vision” is Pearlman’s fourth collection, published in January 2011 by Lookout Books.  The collection includes 18 stories from her previous three books and three early stories never collected. It includes also 13 new stories, in which Pearlman’s favorite themes of accommodation, young love, old love, thwarted love, and love denied; of Jews and their dilemmas; of marriage, family, death, and betrayal are all examined.
Although Pearlman has published more than 250 works of short fiction and non-fiction and has been acclaimed and appreciated as one of our premier storytellers, her work has only recently begun to receive the recognition from national awards that it has long deserved. Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Collection, New Stories from the South, and The Pushcart Prize Collection – Best of the Small Presses.

Edith Pearlman

Her first collection of stories, “Vaquita”, won the Drue Heinz Prize for Literature and was published by the University of Pittsburgh University Press in 1996. Her second, “Love Among The Greats” (Eastern Washington University Press, 2002), won the Spokane Annual Fiction Prize. Her third collection, “How to Fall,” was published by Sarabande Press in 2005 and won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction.
Pearlman’s short essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Smithsonian Magazine, Preservation, Yankee Magazine and Ascent. Her travel writing – about the Cotswolds, Budapest, Jerusalem, Paris, and Tokyo – has been published in The New York Times and elsewhere.
Established nearly 50 years ago in 1963 by Dr. and Mrs. Irving Waltman of West Hartford to honor the memory of the late Edward Lewis Wallant, author of “The Pawnbroker” and other works of fiction, the Wallant Award is today one of the oldest and most prestigious Jewish literary awards in the United States. It is presented to an American Jewish writer, preferably unrecognized, whose published work of fiction is deemed to have significance for the American Jew.
As a Wallant Award winner, Pearlman joins a distinguished list of award recipients, including Cynthia Ozick, Curt Leviant, Chaim Potok, Myla Goldberg, Dara Horn, and Nicole Krauss, as well as last year’s award winner, Julie Orringer.
The Wallant Award ceremony will be held in the 1877 Club, located in the Harry Jack Gray Center on the University of Hartford campus, 200 Bloomfield Ave., West Hartford.
For reservations or more information call (860) 768-4964.