What Goes Without Saying: Collected Stories of Josephine Jacobsen

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Josephine Jacobsen gives us a startling word-by-word gift. Her characters -- human and animal -- know edginess and exhilaration. She is unfoolable. Her judgment is lyric, wise, and daring. She looks all around, her angle of vision invariably original, able to switch from the periscopic to the circumferential."--The 1995 National Book AwardsThe recipient of nearly every major literary award in the United States, Josephine Jacobsen has enjoyed a career that spans more than six decades, from the publication of her first poem at age eleven to her 1995 nomination as a National Book Award finalist. What Goes without Saying brings together thirty of her previously published stories. In "Sound of Shadows, " she takes readers through the double-bolted front door of a rowhouse, into the narrow quarters of Mrs. Bart, an elderly widow who has folded her life into her dark living room where the sole light in her "one room wide" world comes from the magenta- and green-tinged colors flashing on her television screen. We follow the muezzin's melancholy call in "A Walk with Raschid, " an O. Henry Prize story about an intriguing ten-year-old Arab boy who guides a honeymoon couple through the Moroccan Fez. And the tautly written "Protection" begins with an exacting poetic image that is typical of Jacobsen's insightful prose: "Mica sparkles. The banshee ambulance is beating its mad bell. Like a reaped grassblade on a meadow of macadam, its object lies."Praise for Josephine Jacobsen: "Unlike the predominant shrillness, vagueness, or opacity of the contemporary scene, Josephine Jacobsen's work is marked by its reserve, stoic timbre, and its high precision."--Nobel Laureate JosephBrodsky"Josephine Jacobsen writes masterfully, consistently, and better every year. She has a superb narrative gift and she sketches the people of her world with originality, inventiveness, and rare intelligence."--Nation