If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This

Robin Black creates worlds within worlds. Her stories turn on a glance or a phrase – or, more often, on that which is not expressed. If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This explores life’s rich silences: in relationships both acknowledged and covert, and in the unspoken, often treacherous dynamics of families in which so much goes unsaid. A mother, retired to the countryside with her elderly husband, plays sensitive host to her daughter and her secret lover even while she mourns the embers of her own relationship. A blind teenager sees the fractures in her parents’ marriage more clearly than they can themselves. These stories are luminous, wise and unerringly humane, and their emotional generosity is all the more moving for Black's restrained and accomplished style. This is an extraordinarily poised debut collection from one of America’s brightest new voices. `Robin Black knows people. She knows us, she loves us, she takes pity on us and she offers us back to ourselves in clear-eyed and graceful prose’ Amy Bloom `She creates that special kind of literary magic, where a reader experiences everything, right alongside, and it all feels new’ Hannah Tinti `This collection of short stories might more accurately be called a collection of short novels, such is their richness of characterization and plot’ Elizabeth Berg `Like bulletins from the front, these magnificent stories shine a light on what it means to be human’ Dani Shapiro `Few first collections – few collections of any sort – are as intelligent and as moving about both the durability of love and the implacability of loss’ Jim Shepard

About the Author :
Robin Black is the author of the critically acclaimed short story collection If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, a finalist for the Frank O'Connor Short Story Prize and the novel Life Drawing. Her stories and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including O, The Oprah Magazine and the New York Times Magazine. A recipient of fellowships from the Leeway Foundation and the MacDowell Colony, Black was the 2012 Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bryn Mawr College and has taught most recently in the Brooklyn College MFA Program. She lives with her family in Philadelphia. robinblack.net @Robin_Black

Review :
"I want to shout about how just when you thought no one could write a story with any tinge of freshness let alone originality about childhood. . . about marriage...about old age, Black has done it. . . . Black delivers real emotion, the kind that gives you pause....Will Robin Black win [the Pen/Hemingway Prize] for this book? If I were a judge, she would." --Alan Cheuse, "Chicago Tribune" "Pitch-perfect....so deft, so understated, and so compelling that you have to slow down to savor each vignette....Fans of Mary Gaitskill, Amy Bloom, and Miranda July will feel like they've found gold in a river when they discover Robin Black...[A] writer to watch." --"O, "The Oprah""Magazine "Each story reads like a mini-novel...worlds are contained in a single page. And the writing ... oh, the writing....There's no narrative cohesion, no point. Rather, "If I Loved You "is a 'Fantastic Voyage' into the bloodstream of the human species....Maybe it's midlife maturity, maybe it's raw talent, but "If I Loved You "leaves you longing for more." --"San Francisco Chronicle" "Incisive....peopled with characters so fully imagined you'll feel they're in the room." --"People" "Exquisitely distilled tales of loss and reckoning....[Black] evokes a Sparkian blend of skepticism and grace." --Vogue.com "Robin Black stakes out some of the emotional territory occupied by Alice Munro, Amy Bloom and Lorrie Moore....A nuanced portrait of the heart that repays careful reading." --"Financial Times" "Considered and rewarding....Black writes with grace and simplicity and there is a quiet strength in her sentences." "--Times Literary Supplement " "Powerful and touching....sparkling with poetic vision....In every story, [Black] creates wonderful little images, sees symbols, double meanings, poetry everywhere.... Black has an enviable ability to create wholly believable characters, people you'd swear you know, and by showing theml