"A story of a young woman on the brink of becoming--sharp, cosmopolitan, and completely timeless. I hope Silber never goes out of print." --Marlowe Granados, author of Happy Hour " In the City is a novel about the electric promise of a life fully lived, the education a city offers, and the chance-taking it demands in return. Moving through rooming houses and provisional lives, Pauline constructs an improvised existence among the city's risks and riches. She falls in and out of love, tries on selves, and searches for belonging in a vast, exhilarating, and uncertain world. Guided by her own curiosity and nerve, she learns independence as best she can: by pushing forward, into beckoning possibility." --Sarah Blakley-Cartwright, author of Heavy Cream Previous Praise for In the City "[ In the City ] is astonishingly wise, beautifully written, and evocative of so much: just how it felt to be on one's own in the city, waiting for life to begin." --Francine Prose, author of 1974: A Personal History "This is a rare and lovely book .

Pauline, who is unsophisticated, perhaps, but never an innocent, is the person we all remember being." --Robb Forman Dew, author of Being Polite to Hitler "Fascinating . Silber's prose is a marvel of compression, precision, and tact, a perfect counterpoint to [her heroine's] inquisitive, bold, and self-absorbed sensibility." -- The Philadelphia Inquirer Praise for Joan Silber "Like Grace Paley and Lucia Berlin, [Silber is] a master of talking a story past its easiest meaning; like [Alice] Munro, a master of the compression and dilation of time, what time and nothing else can reveal to people about themselves. She has an American voice: silvery, within arm's length of old cadences, but also limber, thieving, marked by occasional raids on slang and jargon, at ease both high and low, funny, tenderhearted, sharp. It gives her the rare ability to reach the deepest places in the plainest ways." --Charles Finch, The Washington Post "Silber illuminates those invisible fissures and inexplicable distances that we sense, however dimly, make up our shared lives with others as much as our formal connections and open battles . I never wonder more at how little we know about how greatly we factor in other people's lives than I do when reading Silber at her best.

" --Joshua Ferris, The New York Times "Some writers wow us with verbal pyrotechnics and wildly outrageous scenarios. Others ply their trade more quietly--relying on subtle language and profound insight into human nature, making art of everyday lives. Joan Silber belongs to the latter category . Silber views her characters' strivings with an empathetic tenderness. That authorial stance is reflected in the prose of Improvement , which is colloquial and knowing and seemingly effortless. There is not a wasted word in all of the novel's 227 pages, which nevertheless contain multitudes." --Judges' citation, National Book Critics Circle Award.