By Laura Hunsberger
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/whqr/local-whqr-989958.mp3
Wilmington, NC – Listen to Laura Hunsberger's full interview with Edith Pearlman from this spring.
Earlier this year Lookout Books, the literary imprint of the Department of Creative Writing at UNCW, released its inaugural publication: a book called Binocular Vision. WHQR's Laura Hunsberger reports that this week the book was named a National Book Award finalist.
Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories, the fourth story collection by writer Edith Pearlman, is one of five finalists from more than three hundred fiction books submitted for the award.
At age 74, Pearlman has won three O. Henry Prizes and her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize anthology.
Pearlman's fiction encompasses a wide range of experiences and people, like the main character from her favorite story:
"I enjoy very much reading the story, "How to Fall" which is about a vaudevillian in the early days of television. I think I am more identified with that man than I am with anybody else in my panoply."
In a WHQR interview this spring, Pearlman describes the care she takes in composing her fiction:
"If you write on a typewriter, then every time you finish a page and make corrections, you must type the whole page over. When you type the whole page over, you find that there are many, many infelicities that you didn't notice. If you were working on a computer, those infelicities would just remain because you were correcting only the things you noticed needed correcting."
Pearlman achieved widespread recognition when Binocular Vision was featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, as well as in the Los Angeles Times.
WHQR's Laura Hunsberger is a student in UNCW's Creative Writing program.