title: A Perfect Stranger: And Other Stories
author:  Roxana Robinson 
description: Starred Review. Robinson's third collection proves her a master of the short story (she has also written three novels, including 2003's <i>Sweetwater</i>). Her finely tuned realism, as well as her settings and charactersNew York, its bedroom communities, the Eastern seaboard and the comfortable upper-middle-class living thererecall Cheever and Updike. ("The Football Game" is such pitch-perfect Cheever as to be slightly suspect as a gentle parody.) Robinson approaches the huge misunderstandings of family life from many angles and anything but timidly. In "Family Christmas," a child confronted with adult mysteries says, "I knew that this language I was trying to learn could not be learned directly, that it was something that had to be absorbed blindly and obliquely.... We would have to learn it through signs, inflections, looks and sighs and tones of voice." Robinson is unusually good with the "strange foreign tongue" of the elderly: the aristocratic grandparents of "Family Christmas"; the dogged, long-married battlers of "Assistance"; the malevolent Santa Fe misanthrope of "Shame"; the befuddled British visitor of the title story. Even the younger couples in the only linked stories, "Choosing Sides" and "Assez," are grandparents, and what they say about grandparenthood is arresting. But the collection's most affecting stories touch on the chasm between parents and children, husbands and wives. Robinson's ear is wonderful, her graceful prose a real pleasure. <i>Agent, Lynn Nesbit</i>. <i>(May)</i> <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
zlib_text: Titles by Carly Phillips
  Serendipity
  Destiny
  Karma
  Perfect Fit
  Perfect Fling
  Perfect Together
  Anthologies
  Hot Summer Nights
  (with Jaci Burton, Jessica Clare, and Erin McCarthy)
  Specials
  Fated
  Perfect Stranger
  
  Perfect Stranger
  Carly Phillips
  BERKLEY BOOKS, NEW YORK
  
  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
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  PERFECT STRANGER
  A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author
  “Perfect Stranger” previously appeared in Hot Summer Nights, published by
  Berkley Sensation Books.
  Copyright © 2013 by Karen Drogin.
  Excerpt from Perfect Together by Carly Phillips copyright © 2014 by Karen
  Drogin.
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