Winner of the first annual Spokane Prize for Short Fiction, Love Among the Greats is a magnificent world tour of characters, tones, and fictional structures, all of them brought with a stunning restraint and clarity reminiscent of Joyce’s Dubliners. Edith Pearlman’s characters are children, old women, young men, rabbis, toy makers, lovers, invalids, immigrants, schmoozers, angels, and fools; all of them perfectly real and accessible, all of them drawn with a kind of comic quietude that only excellent writers can sustain.