Letter: Brookline Library Trustees On The Passing Of Edith Pearlman

The following letter was submitted by the Trustees of the Public Library of Brookline.

The Trustees of the Public Library of Brookline express our condolences to the family of writer Edith Pearlman, who passed away this month at the age of 86.

Since 2016, Brookline High School has presented the Edith Pearlman Creative Writing Award to a talented young writer in the junior or senior class. The 2022 winner was Seraph Bales. The award was established by the Trustees to honor Pearlman, who the Boston Globe called “our greatest living short story writer.”

Edith Pearlman was a long-time resident of Brookline, celebrated for her non-fiction and travel writing and especially for her short fiction. Her essays appeared in The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, The New York Times, and many other publications.

Among her acclaimed books of short stories is the anthology, Binocular Vision, which was nominated for the National Book Award for fiction in 2011 and in 2012 won the National Book Critics Circle award.

Writing about Pearlman’s book Honeydew (2015), the novelist Ann Patchett said that “Pearlman has always had … this capacity to draw beauty from loss.” New Yorker literary critic James Wood saw in her writing a “fascination with the difference between seeing and understanding.”

To the frequently asked question, “Where do you get your ideas?” Pearlman responded, “My ideas come from musings, from observation, from memory; from reading, from travel, from movies, from anecdotes heard or overheard, faces on the subway and rooms seen through a window.” Her words, and her work, have long been an inspiration to aspiring writers.

She will be missed.