Edith Pearlman’s engaging personality shined last Thursday night as she read selected pieces from her anthology of short stories, collectively titled “Binocular Vision.” The collection is a product of Lookout Books, UNCW’s publishing firm. The author was introduced by two Lookout Books editors Emily Smith and Ben George, who double as professors in the Department of Creative Writing and editors of Ecotone, a UNCW literary journal. Pearlman’s impression on the Lookout staff was doubtless as Smith couldn’t help but add an impressive quote from an Italian newspaper declaring Pearlman the “writer who astonished America.”

Pearlman certainly did take the literary world by storm with her intelligently witty and beautiful conceptions of human trial and error and writing inspired selections of short stories that have brought back the lost art. “Binocular Vision” hasn’t gone without its notably deserved recognition; the book graced the cover of the New York Times and Los Angeles Times book reviews and has brought national attention to the previously undisclosed writer.

Even though she has written several critically acclaimed pieces that have landed in the likes of “Best of American Short Stories,” “The O. Henry Prize Collection,” “New Stories from the South,” and “The Pushcart Prize Collection,” Pearlman has only recently been adequately attributed in the book’s introduction by Ann Patchett.

“Binocular Vision should be the book with which Edith Pearlman casts off her secret- handshake status and takes up her rightful position as a national treasure. Put her stories beside those of John Updike and Alice Munro. That’s where they belong,” said Patchett.

At the reading, Pearlman read two selections of her writing, titled “Capers” and “Lineage.” Both had elements of sex, flashbacks and the passage of time in the wake of old age. Their flashbacks served to portray the ambivalence age seems to bring when youth, and the innocence of young love, seems like a lifetime ago.

“Capers” recounts the story of an elderly couple who, not satisfied with the predictability of old age, decide to pick up the practice of larceny. They steal everything from spare change to woman’s handbags and clothes from department stores. However, throughout the story the wife, Dorothy, is unable to escape from flashbacks of their time together as young college students having forbidden sex in the boathouse by the river. It is the precipice upon which she appeases her husband, Henry, with his new stealing endeavor. She is compelled to snatch a $500 scarf right from a sales woman’s hands. The scarf is eventually given back after a daring attempt to run off with it, and the couple returns to reliving their youth together.

Pearlman’s prose is poetic in the development of her characters and the stories they tell. While the lack of definite time periods in a portion of the stories is often confusing, the elusive nature that is brought from this quality adds an effort to transport the reader to an era where time is unnecessary and often unwanted.

However, this quality is forgiven in “The Noncombatant,” a story placed in a nondescript Cape Cod town towards the end of World War II. An old doctor with a young family and wife is suffering the dual pains of cancer in remission and not being able to serve in a war he justifies as heroic. As he slowly recovers, every day walking farther down the main street of his town he curiously wonders about the landlady who rented the house to his family. Mrs. Hazelton is a mystery to Richard and his two young girls. She resides in the shack in the back yard of the house, is a widow, gardens a victory garden, rides a bicycle to an assumed job, comes back at odd hours of the night and wears men’s clothing. However, one day the doctor makes his walk as far as the bar downtown and begins to end his walks with a drink. One night he sees Mrs. Hazelton in the corner booth and idly waves to her, after which the two begin a ritual of disregarding the other’s presence in the bar. However, in the story’s final hour, Richard grabs Mrs. Hazelton in a bone-crushing embrace in rejoice of the war being over. The two separate and the story ends on a happy note in post-war glory.

Pearlman creates stories in “Binocular Vision” that evoke the true nature of human spirit and whose characters inhibit the complexity of emotion while maintaining a simple grace that moves throughout all of her stories.

Pearlman’s own self-assured elegance is plainly seen in person when asked questions from the audience. With a sense of humbleness that seems to stem from such assurance, Pearlman relayed a funny quip of how she came up with the plot of “Lineage,” a story of an old woman in a hospital bed telling her doctors the story of her mother who supposedly conceived her with Nicholos II, Tsar of Russia.

“I came up with ‘Lineage’ because when my husband and I were in Paris, I lost both of our passports,” said Pearlman. “Air France was very helpful and called the State department who asked us a series of questions to determine our legitimacy. They asked us our mother’s maiden names and where my father was born. I said Russia, and he was a…and I almost said tsar. Luckily I stopped myself and we were able to go back. But I couldn’t get the idea that he could have been a tsar out of my head. And so, ‘Lineage’ came to be.”

While the travels of Pearlman have extended from Paris to Tokyo and Romania, she remains unpretentious to her followers, and in signing a young reporter’s copy of her book asks her to “please remember to send your review to me,” a sure indication of her true nature as an author and person.