Tale For The Mirror

DIVHortense Calisher delivers another collection of provocative prose, on par with that of Henry James and John Updike/divDIV/divDIV A novella plus twelve short vignettes, Tale for the Mirror demonstrates Hortense Calisher’s masterful use of language in an exploration of the human condition. In the title novella, a suburban man in the Hudson River Valley analyzes his life and discovers the importance of stories after a sage Indian mystic moves into his neighborhood./divDIV Laced with wit and pathos, the evocative shorter pieces include the galvanizing “The Scream on Fifty-seventh Street,” a textured tale of a widow who overhears an incident outside her window, compelling her to solve a mystery while coming to terms with her own loneliness in an unsentimental city. “The Rehabilitation of Ginevra Leake” is the farcical story of a homely girl from a proper Southern family who finds a home in the Communist party. In “The Seacoast of Bohemia,” a successful Manhattan man comes to terms with the fact that he’ll never have children./div Tale for the Mirror peers into private lives with precision and perception, as only Hortense Calisher could.