A rich and diverse collection of stories detailing life in all its daily battles and yearnings Lynne Sharon Schwartz is a master of tone, deft at creating realistic settings and characters. In Acquainted with the Night, she unleashes sixteen wickedly smart, wholly believable short stories. In the title story, for instance, a man's nocturnal battle against a floating globule in his eye forces him to question his very state of being. In ';Mrs. Saunders Writes to the World,' an anonymous old woman attempts to force people to know her first name by writing ';FRANNY' in big red letters all over her neighborhood. In another, a girl must to deal with the increasingly juvenile actions of her divorced mother.By turns darkly humorous, moving, and witty, Acquainted with the Night demonstrates Schwartz's genius for detail.