"The collapse of her brief marriage has stalled Bea Nightingale's life, leaving her middle-aged and alone, teaching in an impoverished borough of 1950s New York. A plea from her estranged brother gives Bea the excuse to escape lassitude by leaving for Paris to retrieve a nephew she barely knows; but the siren call of Europe threatens to deafen Bea to the dangers of entangling herself in the lives of her brother's family. The story of Bea's travails on the continent is a fierce and heartbreaking insight into the curious nature of love: how it can be commanded and abused; earned and cherished; or even lost altogether."
"Pulitzer Prize finalist Cynthia Ozick's fiction has been awarded multiple O. Henry Prizes. In Foreign Bodies, Ozick crafts a remarkable retelling of Henry James' The Ambassadors-deftly using its plot, yet boldly infusing the novel with an all new place, time, and meaning. It's 1952, and middle-aged Bea Nightingale reluctantly agrees to fly to Paris to help convince her estranged runaway nephew to return to his family. But Bea's experiences abroad will change her forever."
"Two award-winning works of fiction by one of America's finest writers, together in one collection.
In 'The Shawl,' a woman named Rosa Lublin watches a concentration camp guard murder her daughter. In 'Rosa,' that same woman appears thirty years later, 'a mad woman and a scavenger' in a Miami hotel. She has no life in the present because her past will never end. In both stories, there is a shawl—a shawl that can sustain a starving child, inadvertently destroy her, or magically conjure her back to life.
Both stories were originally published in the New Yorker in the 1980s; each was included in the annual Best American Short Stories and awarded First Prize in the annual O. Henry Prize Stories collection. Each succeeds in imagining the unimaginable: the horror of the Holocaust and the unfillable emptiness of its aftermath. Fiercely immediate, complex, and unforgettable, each is a masterwork by a writer the New York Times hailed as 'the most accomplished and graceful literary stylist of our time.'"
